short essay about justice

Essays About Justice: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Discover our guide with examples of essays about justice and prompts for your essay writing and discuss vital matters relating to a person’s or nation’s welfare. 

Justice, in general, refers to the notion that individuals get what they deserve. It includes fundamental moral values ​​in law and politics and is considered an act of fairness, equality, and honesty. Four types of justice deal with how victims can solicit a verdict. They are procedural, distributive, retributive, and restorative. There are many pieces with justice as the subject. It’s because justice is a broad subject encompassing many human values.

5 Essay Examples

1. juvenile justice system of usa essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. wrongful convictions in criminal justice system by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. racial profiling within the criminal justice system by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. criminal justice: the ban-the-box law by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. the special needs of the criminal justice on mental illness cases by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is justice, 2. is justice only for the rich and powerful, 3. the importance of justice, 4. the justice system in mainstream media, 5. justice: then vs. now, 6. justice system around the world, 7. obstructions to justice.

“No doubt, familiarity about the nature of juvenile crimes and how juvenile justice structures function across the world will offer an insight to policy makers, social scientists and for gullible citizens. Thus, a comparative analysis will throw light on how well or how poorly one nation is exercising relative to other nations.”

The essay delves into the justice system process for teenagers who are 18 years and below who commit wrongful acts. Most teenagers involved in juvenile crimes do not have a strong foundation or parental support. The author also talks about the treatments, boot camps, and retreat houses available for teenagers serving in juvenile prisons.

The ever-increasing number of juvenile crimes in the world reflects the mismanagement and lack of juvenile courts, sentencing programs, rehabilitation, and age-appropriate treatment. The writer believes that if mistrials remain in the juvenile system, the problem will continue. They suggest that the government must initiate more system reforms and provide juvenile offenders with proper ethical education.

“The justice system is composed of various legal groups and actors, making a miscarriage possible at any stage of the legal process, or at the hands of any legal actor. Eyewitness error, police misconduct, or falsification of evidence are examples of factors that may lead to a wrongful conviction.”

In this essay, the author uses various citations that show the justice system’s flaws in the process and criteria of its rulings. It further discusses the different instances of unfair judgments and mentions that at least 1% of all convicts serving prison time were wrongfully accused. 

The writer believes that changing the way of addressing different cases and ensuring that all legal professionals do their assigned duties will result in fair justice. You might also be interested in these essays about choice .

“Here in the 21st century, we don’t exactly have ‘Black Codes’ we have what is known as Racial Profiling. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defines racial profiling as ‘the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race ethnicity, religion or national origin.’”

This essay investigates the involvement of race in the criminal justice system, whether they are victims or perpetrators. The author claims that some law enforcement officers mistreat and misjudge people because of their race and presents various cases as evidence of these discriminatory actions. One example is the case of an unarmed black teenager, Jordan Edwards , who was shot because former officer Roy Oliver thought his partner was in danger.

Unfortunately, law enforcement officials use their power and position in society to deny any act of racial profiling, rendering the said law useless. The author declares that while their paper may not prove racial bias in the criminal justice system, they can prove that a person’s color plays a role and can cause harm.

“I think the Ban-the-Box law is the best way of creating employment opportunities for ex-convicts without discrimination. Criminal offenses vary in the degree of the crime, making it unfair to treat all ex-convicts the same. Moreover, some felons learn from their mistakes during detention and parole, creating a better and law-abiding citizen with the ability to work faithfully.”

The essay explains how ex-convicts or current convicts are consistently discriminated against. This discrimination affects their lives even after serving their sentence, especially in their rights to vote and work. 

Regarding job hunting, the author believes the Ban-the-Box law will effectively create more employment opportunities. The law allows employers to see an ex-convict’s skills rather than just their record.  The essay concludes with a reminder that everyone is entitled to a civil right to vote, while private enterprises are free to run background checks. 

“Case management focuses on incorporating key elements that focus on improving the wellbeing of individuals that are being assessed. Mental illness within the criminal justice system is treated as a sensitive issue that requires urgent intervention in order to ensure that an inmate is able to recover.”

This essay pries into one of the most delicate areas of ruling in the justice system, which is leading mentally ill convicts. Offenders who were deemed mentally ill should be able to receive particular treatments for their health while serving time. 

The author mentions that every country must be able to provide mental health services for the inmates to prevent conflicts inside the prison. In conclusion, they suggest that reviewing and prioritizing policies related to mental illness is the best solution to the issue.

Are you interested in writing about mental illnesses? Check out our guide on how to write essays about depression.

7 Prompts for Essays About Justice

Justice is a vast subject, and its literal meaning is the quality of being just. This process often occurs when someone who has broken the law gets what they should, whether freedom or punishment. Research and discuss everything there is to know about justice so your readers can fully understand it. Include a brief history of its origins, types, and uses.

Several situations prove that justice is only for the rich. One of the main reasons is the expensive court fees. Research why victims settle outside the court or just let their abusers get away with crimes.

Include data that proves justice is a luxury where the only ones who can ask for equal treatment are those with resources—present situations or well-known cases to support your statements. On the other hand, you can also provide counter-arguments such as government programs that help financially-challenged individuals.

Every citizen has the right to be protected and treated fairly in court. Explain the importance of justice to a person, society, and government. Then, add actual cases of how justice is applied to encourage reform or chaos. Include relevant cases that demonstrate how justice impacts lives and legal changes, such as the case of Emmett Till .

Talk about how justice is usually depicted on screen and how it affects people’s expectations of how the justice system works. Popular television shows such as Suits and Law and Order are examples of the justice system being portrayed in the media. Research these examples and share your opinion on whether movies or television portray the justice system accurately or not.

In this essay, research how justice worldwide has changed. This can include looking at legal systems, human rights, and humanity’s ever-changing opinions. For instance, child labor was considered normal before but is viewed as an injustice today. List significant changes in justice and briefly explain why they have changed over time. You might also be interested in these essays about violence .

Countries have different ways of instilling justice within their societies. For this prompt, research and discuss the countries you think have the best and worst legal systems. Then, point out how these differences affect the country’s crime rates and quality of life for its citizens.

Examine why people tend to take justice into their hands, disobey legal rules, or give up altogether. It can be because seeking justice is an arduous process resulting in emotional and financial burdens. Often, this occurs when a person feels their government is not providing the support they need. Take a look at this social issue, and discuss it in your essay for a strong argumentative. 

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Professors share 5 myths students believe about college, anxiety among students: what do teachers think about it, how to write a character analysis essay, dorm overbooking and transitional housing: problems colleges are trying to solve, what is justice essay sample, example.

According to Dictionary.com, justice is synonymous to such concepts as righteousness, lawfulness, and equality. As an ethical category, justice can be defined as a principle of fairness, according to which similar cases should be treated alike, and a punishment should be proportionate to the offense; the same refers to rewards for achievements. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines justice as an impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments; the establishment or determination of rights according to the rules of law or equity. As a broader meaning, justice is defined as a conformity to the ideal of just or right doing.

Justice in its legal and ethical perspective can be defined as acting according to the ideal of fair-doing recognized in a particular society, and treating a person or his or her doings in accordance to this ideal and state laws. At the same time, justice, law, and norms are not equivalent; for example, a punishment for a crime judged fairly according to the existing laws does not necessarily look fair in the eyes of public, as it was in Anders Breivik’s case. Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in July, 2011, was sentenced to 21 years of imprisonment (The New York Times), which is unfairly unequal to the scale of the crime he committed.

Referring to justice in its socioeconomic aspect, it is rather difficult to provide an unequivocal definition, as most of them are closely connected to various political and economic doctrines. Simply put, justice can be defined as a way of allocating and distributing material and intangible benefits (such as education, employment opportunities, access to political life) in a society in a way that does not infringe or insult any individual.

Justice is a concept which can be understood in different ways, especially in its socioeconomic perspective. Also, justice can be defined as acting according to the ideal of fair-doing recognized in a particular society, and treating a person or their doings in accordance to this ideal and state laws. In its economical aspect, justice is a way of distributing material and intangible goods in a way that does not insult anyone. As you can see, justice is multifaceted.

To get more samples of similar writings, visit some of the top homework service reviews. You will find everything there that can help you create an engaging and interesting text.

Lewis, Mark, and Sarah Lyall. “Norway Mass Killer Gets the Maximum: 21 Years.” The New York Times. N.p., 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 12 July 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/europe/anders-behring-breivik-murder-trial.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Homelessness — The Importance Of Social Justice

The Importance of Social Justice

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Essays on Justice

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Peace and Justice Essay

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While conflict, used interchangeably with a clash or violence, refers to a state of opposition between people, views, or objectives, violence “…is any condition that prevents a human being from achieving her or his full potential” (Cortright 7). The issue of conflicts has become a daily subject as cases of killings, bombings, and assassinations continue to occur at an alarming level. Racial, color, religious, tribal and economic differences are the major fuels behind conflicts.

Peace, on the other hand, refers to the prevailing conditions in the absence of conflicts and violence. As clashes continue to persist around the globe, playwrights, among other people, have resolved into addressing the issue, the causes, effects, and the possible solutions. According to Terry George, the director of the famous Hotel Rwanda film, the world is yearning for people who can courageously campaign for peace and justice.

Hotel Rwanda , the fascinating composition of Terry George, brings to light the most horrifying upshots, as contemporary history unfolds. It features both tribal and religious conflicts as they occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It is a sensitive account of the Hutus of Rwanda, whose genocide campaigns saw the death of thousands of the marginalized Tutsis, upon whom the departed Belgian colonizers had bestowed power. Revolving around a prominent hotel in Kigali, George features Don Cheadle as the manager of the hotel and a representative of the majority Hutus, the wealthy tribe that enjoys majority of the country’s resources.

His wife stands in for the minority Tutsis. She is the least happy as she watches her people suffer harassments and severe beatings. She pleads to her husband to help them despite being a Hutu. As the violence intensifies, killings of the Tutsi begin based on race, religion, and social status. As the European clients and staff force their way out of the country, Paul becomes in charge of the visitor’s hotel.

He cannot tolerate the mass killings anymore and therefore opts to transform the hotel into a refugee camp for the Tutsis, a step that his Hutu people perceive as betrayal. However, from this courageous step, he ends up preserving the lives of at least 1238 Tutsi people. However, the director qualifies in his good way of demonstrating peace and justice, as this is his objective.

The aforementioned subject of conflicts and violence dominates the movie. Nevertheless, efforts of nurturing peace and justice still stand out. The director features both tribal and religious conflicts as observed, not only in Rwanda, but also in the world allover. The majority Hutus clash with the minority Tutsis claiming, “We are the majority. Tutsis are the minority. Hutus must kill all the Tutsis…” (George). From these words, the director brings to light death as one of the many the consequences of conflicts.

The singling out of a Paul from his people, Hutus, to bring salvation to the minority Tutsis is subject to discussion. As Paul struggles to foster peace among the Tutsis, he is welcomes conflicts from the other side, who view him as a traitor, validating Cortright’s words that “Peace does not mean the absence of conflicts” (7). Patriotism is more than love for ones country.

It entails the willingness and sacrifice of ones own people. According to this theory, Paul is a traitor, rather than a patriot and is subject to a stern punishment. However, the director strategically presents Paul’s bold step of going against the majority, who are never right, to picture him as an epitome of the few who are able to stand for peace and justice, not based on gender, tribe, and religion, to quote a few.

Hotel Rwanda qualifies in driving home the point that, if one person could single him/herself out of the action of the majority, the peace, justice, love, and harmony could carry the day. This film will prove relevant in the coming weeks because the students will find it easy to understand the subject about conflicts and violence. This must-watch film presents a good way of demonstrating peace and justice.

Works Cited

Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas . Cambridge University Press, 2008.

George, Terry, dir. Hotel Rwanda. Lions Gate Films, 2004. Film.

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IvyPanda. (2019, February 20). Peace and Justice. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/

"Peace and Justice." IvyPanda , 20 Feb. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

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IvyPanda . 2019. "Peace and Justice." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

1. IvyPanda . "Peace and Justice." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

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104 Criminal Justice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Criminal justice is a broad and complex field that encompasses various aspects of law enforcement, corrections, and the judicial system. If you are studying criminal justice or planning to pursue a career in this field, you will likely be required to write essays on various topics related to criminal justice. To help you get started, here are 104 criminal justice essay topic ideas and examples:

• The evolution of criminal justice systems over the years.
• The role of technology in modern law enforcement.
• The impact of media on public perception of criminal justice.
• The relationship between poverty and crime rates.
• The effectiveness of community policing in reducing crime.
• The ethical implications of using artificial intelligence in criminal justice.
• The use of body cameras by police officers and its impact on accountability.
• The role of forensic science in solving crimes.
• The challenges of investigating and prosecuting white-collar crimes.
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentencing on the criminal justice system.
• The causes and consequences of wrongful convictions.
• The role of rehabilitation in the criminal justice system.
• The effectiveness of drug courts in reducing recidivism.
• The relationship between mental illness and criminal behavior.
• The ethical considerations of capital punishment.
• The impact of racial profiling on minority communities.
• The role of restorative justice in repairing harm caused by crime.
• The challenges of addressing cybercrime in the digital age.
• The impact of the war on drugs on criminal justice policies.
• The role of victim services in the criminal justice system.
• The effectiveness of probation and parole in reducing recidivism.
• The relationship between poverty and overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.
• The impact of the criminal justice system on marginalized communities.
• The role of criminal profiling in solving serial crimes.
• The challenges of addressing domestic violence within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of the "war on terror" on civil liberties.
• The role of eyewitness testimony in criminal trials.
• The effectiveness of alternative dispute resolution methods in reducing court congestion.
• The relationship between drug addiction and criminal behavior.
• The impact of mandatory reporting laws on child abuse cases.
• The role of private prisons in the criminal justice system.
• The challenges of addressing human trafficking within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of social media on criminal investigations.
• The role of forensic psychology in criminal profiling.
• The effectiveness of anti-gang initiatives in reducing gang-related crimes.
• The relationship between gun control laws and crime rates.
• The impact of the "three strikes" law on recidivism rates.
• The role of community-based corrections programs in reducing incarceration rates.
• The challenges of addressing police misconduct within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of DNA evidence on criminal investigations and convictions.
• The relationship between immigration policies and crime rates.
• The effectiveness of sex offender registration laws in protecting communities.
• The role of social programs in preventing juvenile delinquency.
• The challenges of addressing hate crimes within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of surveillance technologies on privacy rights.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing the opioid crisis.
• The effectiveness of rehabilitation programs for incarcerated individuals.
• The relationship between mental health treatment and recidivism rates.
• The impact of mandatory sentencing for drug offenses on minority communities.
• The role of community-based organizations in reducing gang violence.
• The challenges of addressing police brutality within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of globalization on transnational crimes.
• The role of forensic anthropology in identifying human remains.
• The effectiveness of diversion programs for first-time offenders.
• The relationship between poverty and juvenile delinquency.
• The impact of the Fourth Amendment on law enforcement practices.
• The role of victim impact statements in sentencing decisions.
• The challenges of addressing elder abuse within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of technology on the privacy rights of individuals.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing human rights violations.
• The effectiveness of drug education programs in preventing substance abuse.
• The relationship between mental health courts and recidivism rates.
• The impact of the "school-to-prison pipeline" on marginalized communities.
• The role of forensic entomology in estimating time of death.
• The challenges of addressing child exploitation within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients on poverty rates.
• The role of community supervision in reducing recidivism.
• The relationship between police presence and crime rates.
• The effectiveness of victim-offender mediation in addressing the harm caused by crime.
• The impact of the Fifth Amendment on interrogation practices.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing human trafficking.
• The challenges of addressing cyberbullying within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of surveillance cameras on crime prevention.
• The role of forensic linguistics in analyzing written evidence.
• The effectiveness of gun buyback programs in reducing gun violence.
• The relationship between mental health treatment and criminal behavior.
• The impact of mandatory arrest policies on domestic violence cases.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing environmental crimes.
• The challenges of addressing police corruption within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of eyewitness misidentification on wrongful convictions.
• The relationship between substance abuse and child neglect.
• The effectiveness of reentry programs for formerly incarcerated individuals.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing hate crimes.
• The impact of predictive policing on law enforcement practices.
• The challenges of addressing human rights violations within the criminal justice system.
• The role of forensic odontology in identifying human remains.
• The effectiveness of community-based drug treatment programs.
• The relationship between poverty and gang involvement.
• The impact of the exclusionary rule on the criminal justice system.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing environmental justice.
• The challenges of addressing cyberstalking within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of community surveillance programs on crime prevention.
• The role of forensic accounting in investigating financial crimes.
• The effectiveness of gun control policies in reducing gun-related crimes.
• The relationship between substance abuse treatment and recidivism rates.
• The impact of mandatory reporting laws on elder abuse cases.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing animal cruelty.
• The challenges of addressing corruption within the criminal justice system.
• The impact of false confessions on wrongful convictions.
• The relationship between substance abuse and intimate partner violence.
• The effectiveness of diversion programs for mentally ill offenders.
• The role of criminal justice policies in addressing cybercrime.
• The impact of community-based restorative justice programs on crime reduction.
• The challenges of addressing international crimes within the criminal justice system.

These essay topics provide a starting point for your research and analysis in the field of criminal justice. Remember to choose a topic that interests you and aligns with your academic goals and career aspirations. Good luck with your essays!

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The idea of justice occupies centre stage both in ethics, and in legal and political philosophy. We apply it to individual actions, to laws, and to public policies, and we think in each case that if they are unjust this is a strong, maybe even conclusive, reason to reject them. Classically, justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues (and sometimes as the most important of the four); in modern times John Rawls famously described it as ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls 1971, p.3; Rawls, 1999, p.3). We might debate which of these realms of practical philosophy has first claim on justice: is it first and foremost a property of the law, for example, and only derivatively a property of individuals and other institutions? But it is probably more enlightening to accept that the idea has over time sunk deep roots in each of these domains, and to try to make sense of such a wide-ranging concept by identifying elements that are present whenever justice is invoked, but also examining the different forms it takes in various practical contexts. This article aims to provide a general map of the ways in which justice has been understood by philosophers, past and present.

We begin by identifying four core features that distinguish justice from other moral and political ideas. We then examine some major conceptual contrasts: between conservative and ideal justice, between corrective and distributive justice, between procedural and substantive justice, and between comparative and non-comparative justice. Next we turn to questions of scope: to who or what do principles of justice apply? We ask whether non-human animals can be subjects of justice, whether justice applies only between people who already stand in a particular kind of relationship to one another, and whether individual people continue to have duties of justice once justice-based institutions have been created. We then examine three overarching theories that might serve to unify the different forms of justice: utilitarianism, contractarianism, and egalitarianism. But it seems, in conclusion, that no such theory is likely be successful.

More detailed discussions of particular forms of justice can be found in other entries: see especially distributive justice , global justice , intergenerational justice , international distributive justice , justice and bad luck , justice as a virtue , and retributive justice .

1.1 Justice and Individual Claims

1.2 justice, charity and enforceable obligation, 1.3 justice and impartiality, 1.4 justice and agency, 2.1 conservative versus ideal justice, 2.2 corrective versus distributive justice, 2.3 procedural versus substantive justice, 2.4 comparative versus non-comparative justice, 3.1 human vs non-human animals, 3.2 relational vs non-relational justice, 3.3 individuals vs institutions, 3.4 recognition vs. redistribution, 4.1 accommodating intuitions about justice, 4.2 utilitarian theories of justice: three problems, 5.1 gauthier, 5.3 scanlon, 6.1 justice as equality, 6.2 responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, 6.3 relational egalitarianism, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. justice: mapping the concept.

‘Justice’ has sometimes been used in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from rightness in general. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between ‘universal’ justice that corresponded to ‘virtue as a whole’ and ‘particular’ justice which had a narrower scope (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, chs. 1–2). The wide sense may have been more evident in classical Greek than in modern English. But Aristotle also noted that when justice was identified with ‘complete virtue’, this was always ‘in relation to another person’. In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of ‘what we owe to each other’ (see Scanlon 1998). But it is anyway questionable whether justice should be understood so widely. At the level of individual ethics, justice is often contrasted with charity on the one hand, and mercy on the other, and these too are other-regarding virtues. At the level of public policy, reasons of justice are distinct from, and often compete with, reasons of other kinds, for example economic efficiency or environmental value.

As this article will endeavour to show, justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity. But it is nevertheless worth asking whether we find a core concept that runs through all these various uses, or whether it is better regarded as a family resemblance idea according to which different combinations of features are expected to appear on each occasion of use. The most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian , a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as ‘the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’. This is of course quite abstract until further specified, but it does throw light upon four important aspects of justice.

First, it shows that justice has to do with how individual people are treated (‘to each his due’). Issues of justice arise in circumstances in which people can advance claims – to freedom, opportunities, resources, and so forth – that are potentially conflicting, and we appeal to justice to resolve such conflicts by determining what each person is properly entitled to have. In contrast, where people’s interests converge, and the decision to be taken is about the best way to pursue some common purpose – think of a government official having to decide how much food to stockpile as insurance against some future emergency – justice gives way to other values. In other cases, there may be no reason to appeal to justice because resources are so plentiful that we do not need to worry about allotting shares to individuals. Hume pointed out that in a hypothetical state of abundance where ‘every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want’, ‘the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of’ (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , pp. 183–4). Hume also believed – and philosophical controversy on this point persists until today – that justice has no place in close personal relationships, such as the family, where (it is alleged) each identifies with the others’ interests so strongly that there is no need and no reason for anyone to make claims of personal entitlement. (See Sandel 1982 for a defence of this view; for a critique, see Okin 1989. See also the entry on feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family) .

That justice is a matter of how each separate person is treated appears to create problems for theories such as utilitarianism that judge actions and policies on the basis of their overall consequences aggregated across people – assuming that these theories wish to incorporate rather than discard the idea of justice. In Section 4 below we examine how utilitarians have attempted to respond to this challenge.

Although justice is centrally a matter of how individuals are treated, it is also possible to speak of justice for groups – for example when the state is allocating resources between different categories of citizens. Here each group is being treated as though it were a separate individual for purposes of the allocation.

Second, Justinian’s definition underlines that just treatment is something due to each person, in other words that justice is a matter of claims that can be rightfully made against the agent dispensing justice, whether a person or an institution. Here there is a contrast with other virtues: we demand justice, but we beg for charity or forgiveness. This also means that justice is a matter of obligation for the agent dispensing it, and that the agent wrongs the recipient if the latter is denied what is due to her. It is a characteristic mark of justice that the obligations it creates should be enforceable: we can be made to deliver what is due to others as a matter of justice, either by the recipients themselves or by third parties. However it overstates the position to make the enforceability of its requirements a defining feature of justice (see Buchanan 1987). On the one hand, there are some claims of justice that seem not to be enforceable (by anyone). When we dispense gifts to our children or our friends, we ought to treat each recipient fairly, but neither the beneficiaries themselves nor anyone else can rightfully force the giver to do so. On the other hand, in cases of extreme emergency, it may sometimes be justifiable to force people to do more than justice requires them to do – there may exist enforceable duties of humanity. But these are rare exceptions. The obligatory nature of justice generally goes hand-in-hand with enforceability.

The third aspect of justice to which Justinian’s definition draws our attention is the connection between justice and the impartial and consistent application of rules – that is what the ‘constant and perpetual will’ part of the definition conveys. Justice is the opposite of arbitrariness. It requires that where two cases are relevantly alike, they should be treated in the same way (We discuss below the special case of justice and lotteries). Following a rule that specifies what is due to a person who has features X , Y , Z whenever such a person is encountered ensures this. And although the rule need not be unchangeable – perpetual in the literal sense – it must be relatively stable. This explains why justice is exemplified in the rule of law, where laws are understood as general rules impartially applied over time. Outside of the law itself, individuals and institutions that want to behave justly must mimic the law in certain ways (for instance, gathering reliable information about individual claimants, allowing for appeals against decisions).

Finally, the definition reminds us that justice requires an agent whose will alters the circumstances of its objects. The agent might be an individual person, or it might be a group of people, or an institution such as the state. So we cannot, except metaphorically, describe as unjust states of affairs that no agent has contributed to bringing about – unless we think that there is a Divine Being who has ordered the universe in such a way that every outcome is a manifestation of His will. Admittedly we are tempted to make judgements of what is sometimes called ‘cosmic injustice’ – say when a talented person’s life is cut cruelly short by cancer, or our favourite football team is eliminated from the competition by a freak goal – but this is a temptation we should resist.

This agency condition, however, is less restrictive than it might at first appear. It by no means excludes the possibility that agents can create injustice by omission – for example by failing to create the institutions or to enact the policies that would deliver vital resources to those who need them. Thus it is now common to speak of ‘systemic injustice’ in the case of bad outcomes that no-one intends to occur but that could be prevented by a shift in social norms or institutional practices. The agents in these cases are all those who by acting together to change these things could invert the injustice, but have so far failed to do so.

2. Justice: Four Distinctions

We have so far looked at four elements that are present in every use of the concept of justice. Now it is time to consider some equally important contrasts.

Philosophers writing on justice have observed that it has two different faces, one conservative of existing norms and practices, the other demanding reform of these norms and practices (see Sidgwick 1874/1907, Raphael 2001). Thus on the one hand it is a matter of justice to respect people’s rights under existing law or moral rules, or more generally to fulfil the legitimate expectations they have acquired as a result of past practice, social conventions, and so forth; on the other hand, justice often gives us reason to change laws, practices and conventions quite radically, thereby creating new entitlements and expectations. This exposes an ambiguity in what it means to ‘render each his due’. What is ‘due’ might be what a person can reasonably expect to have given existing law, policy, or social practice, or it might be what the person should get under a regime of ideal justice: this could mean what the person deserves, or needs, or is entitled to on grounds of equality, depending on which ideal principle is being invoked.

Conceptions of justice vary according to the weight they attach to each of these faces. At one extreme, some conceptions interpret justice as wholly concerned with what individuals can claim under existing laws and social conventions: thus for Hume, justice was to be understood as adherence to a set of rules that assign physical objects to individuals (such as being the first possessor of such an object) (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , Book III, Part II). These rules can be explained by reference to the natural associations that form in people’s minds between persons and external objects, and although the system of justice as a whole can be shown to be socially useful, there are no relevant independent standards by which its principles can be assessed (Hume briskly dismissed equality and merit as principles for allocating property to persons). In similar vein, Hayek argued that justice was a property of individual behaviour, understood as compliance with the ‘rules of just conduct’ that had evolved to enable a market economy to function effectively. For Hayek, to speak of ‘social justice’ as an ideal standard of distribution was as meaningless as to speak of a ‘moral stone’ (Hayek 1976, p. 78)

At the other extreme stand conceptions of justice which posit some ideal principle of distribution such as equality, together with a ‘currency’ specifying the respect in which justice requires people to be made equally well off, and then refuse to acknowledge the justice of any claims that do not arise directly from the application of this principle. Thus claims deriving from existing law or practice are dismissed unless they happen to coincide with what the principle requires. More often, however, ideal justice is seen as proposing principles by which existing institutions and practices can be assessed, with a view to reforming them, or in the extreme case abolishing them entirely, while the claims that people already have under those practices are given some weight. Rawls, for example, whose two principles of justice count as ideal principles for this purpose, is at pains to stress that they are not intended to be applied in a way that disregards people’s existing legitimate expectations. About the ‘difference principle’, which requires social and economic inequalities to be regulated so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, he says:

It applies to the announced system of public law and statutes and not to particular transactions or distributions, nor to the decisions of individuals and associations, but rather to the institutional background against which these transactions and decisions take place. There are no unannounced and unpredictable interferences with citizens’ expectations and acquisitions. Entitlements are earned and honored as the public system of rules declares. (Rawls 1993, p. 283)

Here we see Rawls attempting to reconcile the demands of conservative and ideal justice. Yet he does not directly address the question of what should happen when changing circumstances mean that the difference principle requires new laws or policies to be enacted: do those whose prior entitlements or expectations are no longer met have a claim to be compensated for their loss? We could call this the question of transitional justice (though this phrase is often used now in a more specific sense to refer to the process of reconciliation that may occur following civil war or other armed conflicts: see the entry on transitional justice ).

A second important contrast, whose pedigree reaches back at least as far as Aristotle, is between justice as a principle for assigning distributable goods of various kinds to individual people, and justice as a remedial principle that applies when one person wrongly interferes with another’s legitimate holdings. Thus suppose Bill steals Alice’s computer, or sells Alice faulty goods which he claims to be in perfect order: then Alice suffers a loss, which justice demands that Bill should remedy by returning the computer or fulfilling his contract honestly. Corrective justice, then, essentially concerns a bilateral relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim, and demands that the fault be cancelled by restoring the victim to the position she would have been in had the wrongful behaviour not occurred; it may also require that the wrongdoer not benefit from his faulty behaviour. Distributive justice, on the other hand, is multilateral: it assumes a distributing agent, and a number of persons who have claims on what is being distributed. Justice here requires that the resources available to the distributor be shared according to some relevant criterion, such as equality, desert, or need. In Aristotle’s example, if there are fewer flutes available than people who want to play them, they should be given to the best performers (Aristotle, The Politics , p. 128). In modern debates, principles of distributive justice are applied to social institutions such as property and tax systems, which are understood as producing distributive outcomes across large societies, or even the world as a whole.

The conceptual distinction between distributive and corrective justice seems clear, but their normative relationship is more difficult to pin down (see Perry 2000, Ripstein 2004, Coleman 1992, chs. 16–17). Some have claimed that corrective justice is merely instrumental to distributive justice: its aim is to move from a situation of distributive injustice brought about by the faulty behaviour to one that is more nearly (if not perfectly) distributively just. But this view runs into a number of objections. One is that so long as Alice has a legitimate title to her computer, her claim of corrective justice against Bill does not depend on her having had, prior to the theft, the share of resources that distributive justice ideally demands. She might be richer than she deserves to be, yet corrective justice still require that the computer be returned to her. In other words, corrective justice may serve to promote conservative rather than ideal justice, to use the distinction introduced in 2.1. Another objection is that corrective justice requires the wrongdoer himself to restore or compensate the person he has wronged, even if the cause of distributive justice could be better served by transferring resources from a third party – giving Alice one of even-more-undeservedly-rich Charles’s computers, for example. This underlines the bilateral nature of corrective justice, and also the fact that it comes into play in response to faulty behaviour on someone’s part. Its primary demand is that people should not lose out because others have behaved wrongfully or carelessly, but it also encompasses the idea that ‘no man should profit by his own wrong’. If Alice loses her computer in a boating accident, she might, under an insurance scheme, have a claim of distributive justice to a new machine, but she has no claim of corrective justice.

If corrective justice cannot be subsumed normatively under distributive justice, we need to explain its value. What is achieved when we make Bill return the computer to Alice? Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 4) suggested that corrective justice aims to restore the two parties to a position of equality; by returning the computer we cancel both Bill’s unjustified gain and Alice’s unjustified loss. But this assumes that the computer can be returned intact. Corrective justice requires that Alice be made no worse off than she was before the theft, even if that means Bill suffering an absolute loss (e.g. by paying for a new computer if he has damaged Alice’s). Aristotle himself recognized that the idea of evening out gain and loss made no literal sense in a case where one person assaults another and has to compensate him for his injury – there is no ‘gain’ to be redistributed. It seems, then, that the value of corrective justice must lie in the principle that each person must take responsibility for his own conduct, and if he fails to respect the legitimate interests of others by causing injury, he must make good the harm. In that way, each person can plan her life secure in the knowledge that she will be protected against certain kinds of external setbacks. Philosophers and lawyers writing on corrective justice disagree about what standard of responsibility should apply – for example whether compensation is required only when one person wilfully or negligently causes another to suffer loss, or whether it can also be demanded when the perpetrator displays no such fault but is nevertheless causally responsible for the injury.

A third distinction that must be drawn is between the justice of the procedures that might be used to determine how benefits and burdens of various kinds are allocated to people, and the justice of the final allocation itself. It might initially seem as though the justice of a procedure can be reduced to the justice of the results produced by applying it, but this is not so. For one thing, there are cases in which the idea of an independently just outcome makes no sense. A coin toss is a fair way of deciding who starts a game, but neither the Blues nor the Reds have a claim of justice to bat first or kick off. But even where a procedure has been shaped by a concern that it should produce substantively just outcomes, it may still have special properties that make it intrinsically just. In that case, using a different procedure to produce the same result might be objectionable. In an influential discussion, John Rawls contrasted perfect procedural justice , where a procedure is such that if it is followed a just outcome is guaranteed (requiring the person who cuts a cake to take the last slice himself is the illustration Rawls provides), imperfect procedural justice , where the procedure is such that following it is likely, but not certain, to produce the just result, and pure procedural justice , such as the coin-tossing example, where there is no independent way to assess the outcome – if we call it just, it is only on the grounds that it has come about by following the relevant procedure (Rawls 1971, 1999, § 14).

Theories of justice can then be distinguished according to the relative weight they attach to procedures and substantive outcomes. Some theories are purely procedural in form. Robert Nozick distinguished between historical theories of justice, end-state theories, and patterned theories in order to defend the first against the second and third (Nozick 1974). An end-state theory defines justice in terms of some overall property of a distribution (of resources, welfare, etc.) – for example whether it is egalitarian, or whether the lowest position in the distribution is as high as it can be, as Rawls’ difference principle requires. A patterned theory looks at whether what each receives as part of a distribution matches some individual feature such as their desert or their need. By contrast, an historical theory asks about the process by which the final outcome has arisen. In Nozick’s particular case, a distribution of resources is said to be just if everyone within its scope is entitled to what they now own, having acquired it by legitimate means – such as voluntary contract or gift – from someone who was also entitled to have it, leading back eventually to a just act of acquisition – such as labouring on a plot of land – that gave the first owner his valid title. The shape of the final distribution is irrelevant: according to Nozick, justice is entirely a matter of the sequence of prior events that created it (for critical assessments of Nozick’s position, see Paul 1982, Wolff 1991, Cohen 1995, chs. 1–2).

For most philosophers, however, the justice of a procedure is to a large extent a function of the justice of the outcomes that it tends to produce when applied. For instance, the procedures that together make up a fair trial are justified on the grounds that for the most part they produce outcomes in which the guilty are punished and the innocent are acquitted. Yet even in these cases, we should be wary of assuming that the procedure itself has no independent value. We can ask of a procedure whether it treats the people to whom it is applied justly, for example by giving them adequate opportunities to advance their claims, not requiring them to provide personal information that they find humiliating to reveal, and so forth. Studies by social psychologists have shown that in many cases people care more about being treated fairly by the institutions they have to deal with than about how they fare when the procedure’s final result is known (Lind and Tyler 1988).

Justice takes a comparative form when to determine what is due to one person we need to look at what others can also claim: to determine how large a slice of pie is rightfully John’s, we have to know how many others have a claim to the pie, and also what the principle for sharing it should be – equality, or something else. Justice takes a non-comparative form when we can determine what is due to a person merely by knowing relevant facts about that particular person: if John has already been promised the whole of the pie, then that is what he can rightfully claim for himself. Some theories of justice seem to imply that justice is always a comparative notion – for example when it is said that justice consists in the absence of arbitrary inequality – whereas others imply that it is always non-comparative. But conceptually, at least, both forms seem admissible; indeed we can find cases in which it appears we have to choose between doing justice comparatively and doing it non-comparatively (see Feinberg 1974; for a critical response, see Montague 1980). For example, we might have several candidates all of whom are roughly equally deserving of an academic honour, but the number of honours we are permitted to award is smaller than the number of candidates. If we honour some but not others, we perpetrate a comparative injustice, but if to avoid doing so we honour no-one at all, then each is treated less well than they deserve, and so unjustly from a non-comparative perspective.

Theories of justice can then be categorised according to whether they are comparative, non-comparative, or neither. Principles of equality – principles requiring the equal distribution of some kind of benefit – are plainly comparative in form, since what is due to each person is simply an equal share of the benefit in question rather than any fixed amount. In the case of principles of desert, the position is less straightforward. These principles take the form ‘ A deserves X by virtue of P ’, where X is a mode of treatment, and P is a personal characteristic possessed by A (Feinberg 1970). In the case of both X and P , we can ask whether they are to be identified comparatively or non-comparatively. Thus what A deserves might either be an entitlement, or an absolute amount of some benefit – ‘a living wage’, say – or it might be a share of some collective benefit, or a multiple or fraction of what others are receiving – ‘twice what B is getting’, say. Turning to P , or what is often called the desert basis, this may be a feature of A that we can identify without reference to anyone else, or it may be a comparative feature, such as being the best student in a graduating class. So desert-based claims of justice might take one of four different forms depending on whether the basis of desert and/or the deserved mode of treatment is comparative or non-comparative (see Olsaretti 2003 for essays that address this question; for a more advanced treatment, see Kagan 2012, Part III).

Among principles of justice that are straightforwardly non-comparative are ‘sufficiency’ principles which hold that what justice requires is that each person should have ‘enough’, on some dimension or other – for instance, have all of their needs fulfilled, or have a specified set of capabilities that they are able to exercise (for a general defence of sufficiency, though not one that links it specifically to justice, see Frankfurt 2015; for a critique, see Casal 2007). Such principles, however, need to be supplemented by other principles, not only to tell us what to do with the surplus (assuming there is one) once everyone has sufficient resources, but also to guide us in situations where there are too few resources to bring everyone up to the sufficiency threshold. Should we, for example, maximise the number of people who achieve sufficiency, or minimise the aggregate shortfall suffered by those in the relevant group? Unless we are prepared to say that these are not matters of justice, a theory of justice that contains only the sufficiency principle and nothing else looks incomplete.

Some theories of justice cannot readily be classified either as comparative or as non-comparative. Consider one part of Rawls’ theory of social justice, the difference principle, which as noted above requires that social and economic inequalities be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (Rawls 1971, 1999, §12–13). Under this principle, ideally just shares are calculated by determining what each person would receive under the set of social institutions whose economic effect is to raise the worst off person to the highest possible level. This is neither a fixed amount, nor one that depends in any direct sense on what other individuals are receiving, or should receive. Applying the difference principle does require making comparisons, but these are comparisons between the effects of different social institutions – say different tax laws, or different ways of defining property rights – not between individual people and the amounts of benefit they are receiving. We might call theories of this kind ‘holistic’ or ‘systemic’.

3. The Scope of Justice

When we raise questions about the scope of justice, we are asking about when principles of justice take effect and among whom . We have already, when discussing Hume, encountered the idea that there might be circumstances in which justice becomes irrelevant – circumstances in which resources are so abundant that it is pointless to allocate individual shares, or, as Hume also believed, in which resources are so scarce that everyone is permitted to grab what he can in the name of self-preservation. But even in circumstances that are less extreme than these, questions about scope arise. Who can make claims of justice, and who might have the corresponding obligation to meet them? Does this depend on the kind of thing that is being claimed? If comparative principles are being applied, who should be counted as part of the comparison group? Do some principles of justice have universal scope – they apply whenever agent A acts towards recipient B , regardless of the relationship between them – while others are contextual in character, applying only within social or political relationships of a certain kind? The present section examines some of these questions in greater detail.

What does a creature have to do, or be like, to be included within the scope of (at least some) principles of justice? Most past philosophers have assumed that the line should be drawn so as to exclude all non-human animals, but more recently some have been prepared to defend ‘justice for animals’ (Nussbaum 2006, ch. 6; Garner 2013). Against this, Rawls asserts that although we have ‘duties of compassion and humanity’ towards animals and should refrain from treating them cruelly, nonetheless they are ‘outside the scope of the theory of justice’ (Rawls 1971, p. 512; Rawls 1999, p. 448). How could this claim be justified?

We can focus our attention either on individual features that humans possess and animals lack, and that might be thought relevant to their inclusion within the scope of justice, or on asymmetries in the relationship between humans and other animals. To begin with the latter, Hume claimed that the domination humans exercised over animals – such that an animal could only possess something by virtue of our permission – meant that we were ‘bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them’ (Hume, Enquiry , p. 190). For Rawls and those influenced by him, principles of distributive justice apply among agents who are related to one another as participants in a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’, and this might seem to exclude animals from the scope of such principles. Critics of this view have pointed to cases of human-animal co-operation (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, Valentini 2014); however these arguments focus mainly or entirely on the special case of dogs , and it seems implausible to generalise from them in an attempt to show that human-animal relationships generally have a co-operative character.

But the claim that justice only applies to participants in co-operative practices is anyway vulnerable to the objection that it risks excluding seriously disabled people, people living in isolated communities, and future generations from the scope of justice, so it does not seem compelling as a claim about justice in general (see further below). Might there be other reasons why animals cannot make claims of justice on us? Another Rawls-inspired suggestion is that animals lack the necessary moral powers, in particular the capacity to act on principles of justice themselves. They cannot distinguish what is justly owed to them from what is not; and they cannot determine what they owe to others – whether to humans or to other non-human animals – as a matter of justice. This suggestion interprets justice as involving a kind of reciprocity: an agent to whom justice is due must also in principle be an agent who could dispense justice to others, by virtue of having the relevant capacity, even if for physical reasons – such as suffering from severe disability – they cannot do so in practice.

If this suggestion is rejected, and we allow that some animals, at least, should be included within the scope of justice, we can then ask about the form that justice should take in their cases. Using the distinction drawn in 2.4 above, it appears that justice for animals must be non-comparative. For example, we might attribute rights to the animals over whom we exercise power – rights against cruel treatment, and rights to food and shelter, for instance. This would involve using a sufficiency principle to determine what animals are owed as a matter of justice. It is much less plausible to think that comparative principles might apply, such that giving special treats to one cat but not another could count as an injustice.

The Rawlsian view introduced in the previous section, which holds that principles of social justice apply among people who are engaged together in a co-operative practice, is a leading example of a relational theory of justice. Other theories offer different accounts of the relevant justice-generating feature: for example, Nagel has argued that principles of distributive justice apply among people who by virtue of being citizens of the same state are required both to comply with, and accept responsibility for, the coercive laws that govern their lives (Nagel 2005). In both cases, the claim being made is that when people stand in a certain relationship to one another, they become subject to principles of justice whose scope is limited to those within the relationship. In particular, comparative principles apply within the relationship, but not beyond it. If A stands in a relationship (of the right kind) to B , then it becomes a matter of justice how A is treated relative to B , but it does not matter in the same way how A is treated relative to C who stands outside of the relationship. Justice may still require that C be given treatment of a certain kind, but that will be justice in its non-comparative guise.

Whether justice is relational in either of the ways that Rawls and Nagel suggest has large implications for its scope. In particular it bears on the question whether there is such a thing as global distributive justice, or, in contrast, whether distributive principles only apply to people who are related together as members of the same society or citizens of the same state. For example, might the global inequalities that exist between rich and poor in today’s world be unjust simply as inequalities, or are they unjust only insofar as they prevent poor people from living lives that we judge to be acceptable? (see entries on international distributive justice and global justice ) So much hangs on the question whether, and if so in virtue of what, distributive justice has a relational character. What reason can be given for thinking that it does?

Suppose we have two people A and B , of whom one is significantly better off than another – has greater opportunities or a higher income, say. Why should this be a concern of justice? It seems it will not be a concern unless it can be shown that the inequality between A and B can be attributed to the behaviour of some agent, individual or collective, whose actions or omissions have resulted in A being better off than B – in which case we can ask whether the inequality between them is justifiable, say on grounds of their respective deserts. This reiterates the claim in 1.4 above that without an agent to whom the outcome can be attributed there can only be justice or injustice in a metaphorical, ‘cosmic’, sense. Relational theorists claim that when people associate with one another in the relevant way, they become agents of justice. On a small scale they can organize informally to ensure that each receives what is due to him relative to the rest. On a larger scale, distributive justice requires the creation of legal and other institutions to achieve that outcome. Moreover failure to co-ordinate their actions in this way is likely to be a source of injustice by omission.

Debates about the scope of justice then become debates about whether different forms of human association are of the right kind to create agency in the relevant sense. Take the question of whether principles of social justice should apply to market transactions. If we see the market as a neutral arena in which many individual people freely pursue their own purposes, then the answer will be No. The only form of justice that arises will be justice in the conduct of each agent, who must avoid inflicting harm on others, must fulfil her contracts, and so forth. Whereas if we see the market as governed by a humanly-constructed system of rules that the participants collectively have the power to change – by legislation, for example – then we cannot avoid asking whether the outcomes it currently produces meet relevant standards of distributive justice, whatever we take these to be. A similar issue arises in the debate about over principles of global justice referred to above: is the current world order such that it makes sense to regard humanity as a whole as a collective agent responsible for the distributive outcomes it allows to occur?

Once institutions are established for the purpose (among other things) of delivering justice on a large scale, we can ask what duties of justice individual people have in consequence. Is their duty simply to support the institutions, and comply with whatever rules of conduct apply to them personally? Or do they have further duties to promote justice by acting directly on the relevant principles in their daily lives? No one doubts that some duties of justice fall directly on individuals, for example duties not to deceive or defraud when engaging in commercial transactions (and duties of corrective justice where behaviour is faulty), or duties to carry out one’s fair share of an informally organized project from which one expects to benefit, such as cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Others fall on them because they are performing a role within a social institution, for example the duty of an employer not to discriminate on grounds of race or gender when hiring workers, or the duty of a local government officer to assign public housing to those in greatest need. But what is much more in dispute is whether individual people have more extensive duties to promote social justice (for contrasting views, see Cohen 2008, ch. 3, Murphy 1998, Rawls 1993, Lecture VII, Young 2011, ch. 2).

Consider two cases: the first concerns parents who confer advantages on their children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity. If the latter principle of justice requires, to cite Rawls, that ‘those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin’ (Rawls 2001, p. 44) then there are myriad ways in which some parents can bestow advantages on their children that other parents cannot – financial benefits, educational opportunities, social contacts, and so forth – that are likely to bring greater success in later life. Are parents therefore constrained as a matter of justice to avoid conferring at least some of these advantages, or are they free to benefit their children as they choose, leaving the pursuit of equal opportunities entirely in the hands of the state (for a careful analysis, see Brighouse and Swift 2014)?

The second example concerns wage differentials. Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage – which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else (perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome)? Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society. But if individuals were willing to forego incentives, and so economic inequalities served no useful purpose, then the arrangement that worked to the greatest benefit of the (otherwise) least advantaged would be one of strict equality. Cohen (2008) argues that Rawls’ position is internally inconsistent. As citizens designing our institutions we are supposed to be guided by the difference principle, but as private actors in the marketplace, we are permitted to ignore that principle and bargain for higher wages, even though doing so will work to the disadvantage of the worst-off group. Justice, according to Cohen, requires us to embrace an ethos of service that disdains material incentives.

Why might we hesitate before agreeing that in cases such as these, justice requires people to refrain from doing things that they are permitted to do by the public rules of their society (passing on benefits to their children; seeking higher wages)? One reason is that the refraining is only going to have a significant effect if it is practised on a large scale, and individuals have no assurance that others will follow their example; meanwhile they (or their children) will lose out relative to the less scrupulous. A connected reason has to do with publicity: it may be hard to detect whether people are following the required ethos or not (see Williams 1998). Is the person who sends her child to a private school because she claims he has special needs that the local state school cannot meet being sincere, or is she just trying to buy him comparative advantage? How can we tell whether the person who claims more money, but merely, he says, as compensation for the unusual stress that his work involves, is reporting honestly? (for Cohen’s response, see Cohen 2008, ch. 8) It appears, then, that there are principles of justice that apply to what Rawls calls ‘the basic structure of society [as] a public system of rules’ that do not apply in the same way to the personal behaviour of the individuals who live within that structure. Attending to the scope , as well as the content , of justice is important.

Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition. They are impacted by social norms and social practices that diminish their sense of agency and induce them to see themselves as of lesser value than others. Here then justice is understood as being adequately and appropriately recognized, and injustice as involving failures of recognition, or in some cases ‘misrecognition’, when a person is placed in a category or assigned an identity that is not their own. In one influential formulation of this idea, ‘it is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value in whose construction they have not equally participated and which disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them’ (Fraser in Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 29).

What, then, does it mean to be recognized? In general it means to be viewed and treated by others in the way that is appropriate to the features that you possess, but most philosophers regard recognition as multidimensional. In particular, they distinguish between being recognized as an equal, where a person is accorded the kind of standing that gives them an equal status with other members of the relevant group, and being recognized for having characteristics, achievements or an identity that may be uniquely their own. Recognition in this second sense may involve the unequal granting of social esteem. Justice as recognition, therefore, is internally complex. At the social level, Axel Honneth distinguishes ‘three forms of social recognition, based in the sphere-specific principles of love, equal legal treatment, and social esteem’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003 p. 180)

The question that arises is how best to understand the relationship between justice of this kind and distributive justice, involving the allocation of material resources and so forth. For Honneth, justice as recognition is understood expansively so that it can also capture issues of economic justice, the thought being that the harm inflicted when, say, labour is not adequately rewarded can be understood as a failure to offer adequate recognition of the worker’s social contribution. For Nancy Fraser, by contrast, recognition and redistribution are seen as two mutually irreducible but jointly necessary conditions for social justice. Failures of recognition can be experienced by some among the economically privileged – such as ‘the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi to pick him up’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 34). Justice as recognition requires cultural shifts in the way that different forms of identity and different types of achievement are valued that are independent of the institutional changes required to achieve distributive justice.

A particular form of recognitional injustice is epistemic injustice as diagnosed by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007). This occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a source of knowledge, and it takes two main forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. As Fricker explains ‘testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone as at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (Fricker 2007, p. 1). She argues that testimonial injustice matters for two reasons. First, the person who suffers from it is less able to protect or advance their interests – for example they are less likely to be believed when having to defend themselves in court. Second, since others are unwilling to regard them as competent sources of knowledge, they may lose trust in their own capacity to know, leading in some cases to ‘prolonged self-doubt and loss of intellectual confidence’.

Hermeneutical injustice arises in the context of unequal relationships in which the subordinated party lacks the concept or concepts needed to make sense of their experience (and thereby to challenge their subordination). Fricker uses the example of a woman who suffered sexual harassment at the time before feminists had developed that concept, and so had no adequate word to describe what she was experiencing. Hermeneutical injustice matters most when it is systematic, brought about by power inequalities that leave certain groups ‘hermeneutically marginalised’. However she treats epistemic justice as a virtue that individual hearers can develop, in contrast to recognition theorists like Fraser and Honneth for whom achieving recognitional justice requires collective action to change social and cultural norms on the part of misrecognized groups.

4. Utilitarianism and Justice

Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? This may in the first place depend on how we interpret utilitarianism. We treat it here as a normative theory whose aim is to supply a criterion – the greatest happiness principle – that can be used, directly or indirectly, both by individuals and by institutions (such as states) in deciding what to do, rather than simply as a tool for evaluating states of affairs. Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency. We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility (for different ways of formulating this view, see the entry on rule consequentialism) .

Most utilitarians have regarded it as part of their task in defending utilitarianism to show that it can both accommodate and explain much of what we intuitively believe about justice. This is certainly true of two of the greatest among them, John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, both of whom went to considerable lengths to show that familiar principles of justice could be given a utilitarian rationale (Mill Utilitarianism , ch. 5; Sidgwick 1874/1907, Book III, ch.5). Bentham, in contrast, was more cavalier: ‘justice, in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage, feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility, applied to certain particular cases’ ( The Principles of Morals and Legislation , pp. 125–6). If we follow the lead of Mill and Sidgwick in wishing to take seriously how justice is commonly understood, the utilitarian has two challenges to face. First he or she must show that the demands of justice as commonly understood correspond roughly to the rules that when followed by persons, or implemented by institutions, are most conducive to the greatest happiness. They need not mirror the latter exactly, because utilitarians will argue, as both Mill and Sidgwick did, that our intuitions about justice are often ambiguous or internally inconsistent, but there must be enough overlap to warrant the claim that what the utilitarian theory can accommodate and explain is indeed justice . (As Sidgwick (1874/1907, p. 264) put it, ‘we may, so to speak, clip the ragged edge of common usage, but we must not make excision of any considerable portion’.) Second, some explanation must be given for the distinctiveness of justice. Why do we have a concept that is used to mark off a particular set of requirements and claims if the normative basis for these requirements and claims is nothing other than general utility? What accounts for our intuitive sense of justice? The task confronting the utilitarian, then, is to systematize our understanding of justice without obliterating it.

By way of illustration, both Mill and Sidgwick recognize that desert , of both reward and punishment, is a key component of common understandings of justice, but they argue that if we remain at the level of common sense when we try to analyse it, we run into irresolvable contradictions. For instance, we are inclined to think that a person’s deserts should depend on what they have actually achieved – say the economic value of what they have produced – but also, because achievement will depend on factors for which the person in question can claim no credit, such as inborn talent, that their deserts should depend only on factors for which they are directly responsible, such as the amount of effort they expend. Each of these conceptions, when put into practice, would lead to a quite different schedule of rewards, and the only means to escape the impasse, these utilitarians claim, is to ask which schedule will generate most utility by directing people’s choices and efforts in the most socially productive way. Similar reasoning applies to the principles of punishment: the rules we should follow are the rules that are most conducive to the ends for which punishment is instituted, such as deterring crime.

To explain the distinctiveness of justice, Mill suggests that it designates moral requirements that, because of their very great importance to human well-being, people have a right to have discharged, and are therefore matters of perfect obligation. A person who commits an injustice is always liable to punishment of some kind, he argues. So he explains our sense of justice in terms of the resentment we feel towards someone who breaches these requirements. Sidgwick, who laid greater stress than Mill on the connection between justice and law, also underlined the relationship between justice and gratitude, on one side, and resentment, on the other, in order to capture the way in which our concern for justice seems to differ from our concern for utility in general.

Yet despite these efforts to reconcile justice and utility, three serious obstacles still remain. The first concerns what we might call the currency of justice: justice has to do with the way that tangible benefits and burdens are assigned, and not with the happiness or unhappiness that the assignees experience. It is a matter of justice, for example, that people should be paid the right amount for the jobs that they do, but, special circumstances aside, it is no concern of justice that John derives more satisfaction from his fairly-earned income than Jane does from hers (but see Cohen 1989 for a different view). There is so to speak, a division of labour, under which rights, opportunities, and material benefits of various kinds are allocated by principles of justice, while the conversion of these into units of utility (or disutility) is the responsibility of each individual recipient (see Dworkin 2000, ch. 1). Utilitarians will therefore find it hard to explain what from their point of view seems to be the fetishistic concern of justice over how the means to happiness are distributed, rather than happiness itself.

The second obstacle is that utilitarianism judges outcomes by totalling up utility levels, and has no independent concern for how that utility is distributed between persons. So even if we set aside the currency issue, utilitarian theory seems unable to capture justice’s demand that each should receive what is due to her regardless of the total amount of benefit this generates. Defenders of utilitarianism will argue that when the conduct-guiding rules are being formulated, attention will be paid to distributive questions. In particular, when resources are being distributed among people we know little about individually, there are good reasons to favour equality, since in most cases resources have diminishing marginal utility – the more of them you have, the less satisfaction you derive from additional instalments. Yet this is only a contingent matter. If some people are very adept at turning resources into well-being – they are so-called ‘utility monsters’ – then a utilitarian should support a rule that privileges them. This seems repugnant to justice. As Rawls famously put the general point, ‘each member of society is thought to have an inviolability founded on justice which….even the welfare of every one else cannot override’ (Rawls 1971, p. 28; Rawls 1999, pp. 24–25).

The third and final difficulty stems from utilitarianism’s thoroughgoing consequentialism. Rules are assessed strictly in the light of the consequences of adopting then, not in terms of their intrinsic properties. Of course, when agents follow rules, they are meant to do what the rule requires rather than to calculate consequences directly. But for a utilitarian, it is never going to be a good reason for adopting a rule that it will give people what they deserve or what they are entitled to, when desert or entitlement are created by events in the past, such as a person’s having performed a worthwhile action or entered an agreement. Backward-looking reasons have to be transmuted into forward-looking reasons in order to count. If a rule such as pacta sunt servanda (‘agreements must be kept’) is going to be adopted on utilitarian grounds, this is not because there is any inherent wrongness in defaulting on a compact one has made, but because a rule that compacts must be kept is a useful one, since it allows people to co-ordinate their behaviour knowing that their expectations about the future are likely to be met. But justice, although not always backward-looking in the sense explained, often is. What is due to a person is in many cases what they deserve for what they have done, or what they are entitled to by virtue of past transactions. So even if it were possible to construct a forward-looking rationale for having rules that closely tracked desert or entitlement as these are normally understood, the utilitarian still cannot capture the sense of justice – why it matters that people should get what is due to then – that informs our common-sense judgements.

Utilitarians might reply that their reconstruction preserves what is rationally defensible in common sense beliefs while what it discards are elements that cannot survive sustained critical reflection. But this would bring them closer to Bentham’s view that justice, as commonly understood, is nothing but a ‘phantom’.

5. Contractarianism and Justice

The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice. The idea here is not that people actually have entered a contract to establish justice, or that they should proceed to do so, but that we can understand justice better by asking the question: what principles to govern their institutions, practices and personal behaviour would people choose to adopt if they all had to agree on them in advance? The contract, in other words, is hypothetical; but the search for agreement is meant to ensure that the principles chosen would, when implemented, not lead to outcomes that people could not accept. Thus whereas a utilitarian might, under some circumstances, be prepared to support slavery – if the misery of the slaves were outweighed by the heightened pleasures of the slave-owners – contractarians claims that no-one could accept a principle permitting slavery, lest they themselves were destined to be slaves when the principle was applied.

The problem that contractarians face is to show how such an agreement is possible. If we were to ask people, in the real world, what principles they would prefer to live under, they are likely to start from a position of quite radical disagreement, given their interests and their beliefs. Some might even be willing to endorse slavery, if they were fairly certain that they would not end up as slaves themselves, or if they were sado-masochists who viewed the humiliations inflicted on slaves in a positive light. So in order to show how agreement could be achieved, contractarians have to model the contracting parties in a particular way, either by limiting what they are allowed to know about themselves or about the future, or by attributing to them certain motivations while excluding others. Since the modelling can be done differently, we have a family of contractarian theories of justice, three of whose most important members are the theories of Gauthier, Rawls and Scanlon.

Gauthier (1986) presents the social contract as a bargain between rational individuals who can gain through co-operating with one another, but who are competing over the division of the resulting surplus. He assumes that each is interested only in trying to maximise his own welfare, and he also assumes that there is a non-co-operative baseline from which the bargaining begins – so nobody would accept a solution that left her less well off than in the baseline condition. Each person can identify the outcome under which they fare best – their maximum gain – but they have no reason to expect others to accept that. Gauthier argues that rational bargainers will converge on the principle of Minimax Relative Concession , which requires each to concede the same relative proportion of their maximum possible gain relative to the non-co-operative baseline. Thus suppose there is a feasible arrangement whereby each participant can achieve two-thirds of their maximum gain, but no arrangement under which they all do better than that, then this is the arrangement that the principle recommends. Each person has made the same concession relative to the outcome that is best for them personally – not accepting the same absolute loss of welfare, let it be noted, but the same proportionate loss.

There are some internal difficulties with Gauthier’s theory that need to be recorded briefly (for a full discussion, see Barry 1989, esp. Part III). One is whether Minimax Relative Concession is in fact the correct solution to the bargaining problem that Gauthier introduces, as opposed to the standard Nash solution which (in a simple two-person case) selects the outcome in which the product of the two parties’ utilities is maximised (for discussion of different solutions to the bargaining problem, see the entry on contemporary approaches to the social contract , § 3.2). A second is whether Gauthier is able to justify positing a ‘Lockean’ baseline, under which each is assumed to respect the natural rights of the others, as the starting point for bargaining over the surplus – as opposed to a more conflictual ‘Hobbesian’ baseline in which individuals are permitted to use their natural powers to threaten one another in the process of establishing what each could expect to get in the absence of co-operation. But the larger question is whether a contract modelled in this way is an appropriate device for delivering principles of justice. On the one hand, it captures the idea that the practice of justice should work to everyone’s advantage, while requiring all those involved to moderate the demands they make on one another. On the other hand, it prescribes a final distribution of benefit that appears morally arbitrary, in the sense that A ’s bargaining advantage over B – which stems from the fact that his maximum possible gain is greater than hers – allows him to claim a higher level of benefit as a matter of justice . This seems implausible: there may be prudential reasons to recommend a distribution that reflects the outcome that self-interested and rational bargainers would arrive at, but claims of justice need a different basis.

John Rawls’ theory of justice is the most widely-cited example of a contractarian theory, but before outlining it, two words of caution are necessary. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls (1958) through his major work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and on to Rawls (1993) and Rawls (2001). Second, although Rawls has consistently claimed that the principles of justice he defends are the principles that would be selected by people in a suitably designed ‘original position’ in which they are asked to choose the social and political institutions they will live under – this is what qualifies his theory as contractarian – it is less clear how important a role the contract itself plays in his thinking. His principles, which are discussed elsewhere (see the entry on John Rawls) , can be defended on their own merits as a theory of social justice for a modern liberal society, even if their contractual grounding proves to be unsound. Rawls presents the contracting parties as seeking to advance their own interests as they decide which principles to favour, but under two informational constraints. First, they are not allowed to know their own ‘conception of the good’ – what ends they personally find it most valuable to pursue – so the principles must be couched in terms of ‘primary goods’, understood as goods that it is better to have more rather than less of whatever conception of the good you favour. Second, they are placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that deprives them of any knowledge of personal characteristics, such as their gender, their place in society, or the talents and skills they possess. This means that they have no basis on which to bargain for advantage, and have to consider themselves as generic persons who might be male or female, talented or untalented, and so forth. In consequence, Rawls argues, all will choose to live under impartial principles that work to no-one’s advantage in particular.

The problem for Rawls, however, is to show that the principles that would be selected in such an original position are in fact recognizable as principles of justice . One might expect the parties to calculate how to weigh the primary goods (which Rawls catalogues as ‘rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth’) against each other, and then to choose as their social principle ‘maximise the weighted sum of primary goods, averaged across all persons’. This, however, would bring the theory very close to utilitarianism, since the natural method of weighing primary goods is to ask how much utility having a given quantity of each is likely, on average, to bring (for the claim that utilitarianism would be chosen in a Rawlsian original position, see Harsanyi 1975). Since Rawls wishes to reject utilitarianism, he has to adjust the psychology of the parties in the original position so that they reason differently. Thus he suggests that, at least in developed societies, people have special reason to prioritise liberty over the other goods and to ensure that it is equally distributed: he argues that this is essential to safeguard their self-respect. In later writing his argument is less empirical: now the parties to the contract are endowed with ‘moral powers’ that must be exercised, and it is then fairly easy to show that this requires them to have a set of basic liberties.

When he turns to the distribution of income and wealth, Rawls has to show why his choosers would pick the difference principle, which considers only the position of the worst-off social group, over other principles such as maximising average income across the whole society. In Theory of Justice he does this by attributing special psychological features to the choosers that make it appropriate for them to follow the ‘maximin’ rule for decisions under uncertainty (choose the option whose worst possible outcome is least bad for you). For example, they are said to be much more concerned to achieve the minimum level of income that the difference principle would guarantee them than to enjoy increases above that level. In his later work, he abandons this reliance on maximin reasoning and gives greater prominence to another argument hinted at in Theory . This portrays the contracting parties as starting out from the presumption that income and wealth should be distributed equally, but then recognizing that all can benefit by permitting certain inequalities to arise. When these inequalities are governed by the difference principle, they can be justified to everyone, including the worst off, thus creating the conditions for a more stable society. But we need then to ask why equal distribution should be treated as the benchmark, departures from which require special justification. When Rawls says that it is ‘not reasonable’ for any of the parties initially to expect more than an equal share (Rawls 1971, p. 150; Rawls 1999, p. 130), is this simply a corollary of their position as rational choosers behind a veil of ignorance, or has Rawls in addition endowed them with a substantive sense of justice that includes this presumption of equality?

Although Rawls throughout presents his theory of justice as contractarian, we can now see that the terms of the contract are in part determined by prior normative principles that Rawls engineers the parties to follow. So in contrast to Gauthier, it is no longer simply a case of self-interested contractors negotiating their way to an agreement. Rawls candidly admits that the contractual situation has to be adjusted so that it yields results that match our pre-existing convictions about justice. But then we may ask how much work the contractual apparatus is really doing (see Barry 1989, ch. 9 for a critical appraisal).

Scanlon (1998) does not attempt to deliver a theory of justice in the same sense as Rawls, but his contractarian account of that part of morality that specifies ‘what we owe to each other’ covers much of the same terrain (for an explicit attempt to analyse justice in Scanlonian terms, see Barry 1995). Like Rawls, Scanlon is concerned to develop an alternative to utilitarianism, and he does so by developing a test that any candidate moral principle must pass: it must be such that no-one could reasonably reject it as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement (see the entry on contractualism ). Scanlon’s contractors are not positioned behind a veil of ignorance. They are able to see what effect adopting any proposed principle would have on them personally. If that effect is unacceptable to them, they are permitted to reject it. Each person has, so to speak, a veto on any general principle for regulating conduct. Those that survive this test are defensible as principles of justice – Scanlon concedes that there might be alternative sets of such principles appropriate to different social conditions.

It might seem, however, that giving each person a veto would lead straightforwardly to deadlock, since anyone might reject a principle under which he fared badly relative to some alternative. Here the idea of reasonable rejection becomes important. It would not, Scanlon thinks, be reasonable to reject a principle under which one does badly if the alternatives all involve someone else faring worse still. One needs to take account of other people’s reasons for rejecting these alternatives. It might then appear that Scanlon’s contractualism yields the difference principle, which requires the worst-off group in society to be as well of as they can be. But this is not the conclusion that Scanlon draws (though he acknowledges that there might be special reasons to follow Rawls in requiring basic social institutions to follow the difference principle). The claims of other groups must be considered too. If a policy greatly benefits many others, while slightly worsening the position of a few, though without leaving them very badly off, it may well not be rejectable. Scanlon’s position leaves some room for aggregation – it makes a difference how many people will be benefitted if a principle is followed – though not the simple form of aggregation that utilitarians defend.

Scanlon also says that a person can have a reason for rejecting a principle if it treats them unfairly, say by benefitting some but not others for arbitrary reasons. This presupposes a norm of fairness that the contractarian theory does not itself attempt to explain or justify. So it looks as though the purpose of the theory is to provide a distinctive account of moral reasoning (and moral motivation) but not to defend any substantive principles of distributive justice. In this respect, Scanlon’s contractualism is less ambitious than either Gauthier’s or Rawls’.

6. Egalitarianism and Justice

In the recent past, many philosophers have sought to establish a close connection between justice and equality: they ask the question ‘what kind of equality does justice require?’, and to that several competing answers have been given (see, for example Cohen 1989, Dworkin 2000, Sen 1980). But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense. As we saw in sect 1.3, justice requires the impartial and consistent application of rules, from which it follows that when two people are alike in all relevant respects, they must be treated equally. But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 3). If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B , justice may require that she receives more than B does. So here formal equality of treatment – the same rule applied to both – leads to an unequal outcome. Again, when justice takes the conservative form of respect for existing entitlements or legitimate expectations (see para 2.1) there is no reason to anticipate that what is due to different people will be substantively the same.

So we need to ask about the circumstances in which justice requires a substantively equal distribution of advantages. One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others. Suppose a group experiences a windfall gain for which no-one can claim any credit: a pot of gold somehow appears in their midst. Then unless any member can make a justice-related claim for a larger-than-equal share – say that she has special needs that she lacks sufficient resources to meet – an equal distribution of the gold is what justice demands, since any other distribution would be arbitrary. Equality here is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice.

Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims. By sharing the good equally, we can at least ensure that every claim has been partially satisfied. Thus suppose we have limited supplies of a drug that can treat malaria, and a number of patients displaying symptoms of the disease, but lacking specialised medical knowledge we cannot tell whether one person’s condition is more serious than another’s; then by sharing out the drug equally, we can guarantee that each person at least receives the highest fraction of what they really need. Any other distribution must leave at least one person with less (this of course assumes that there is no threshold amount of the drug beneath which it is ineffective; if that assumption is wrong, justice under the stated conditions might require a lottery in which the chosen ones receive threshold-size doses).

If justice requires equality only by default, it might seem to apply only in a narrow range of cases. How could egalitarian justice be made more robust? One approach involves declaring a wider range of factors irrelevant to just distribution. Thus one formulation of the principle holds that no-one should be worse-off than anyone else as a result of their ‘morally arbitrary’ characteristics, where a characteristic is morally arbitrary when its possessor cannot claim credit for having it. This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it (more controversially) to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions. In doing so, it discounts most claims of desert, since when people are said to deserve benefits of various kinds, it is usually for performing actions or displaying qualities that depend upon innate characteristics such as strength or intelligence. In the following section, we will see how egalitarian theories of justice have tried to incorporate some desert-like elements by way of response. But otherwise justice as equality and justice as desert appear to be in conflict, and the challenge is to show what can justify equal treatment in the face of inequalities of desert.

A second approach answers this challenge by explaining why it is positively valuable to afford people equal treatment even if they do display features that might appear to justify differential treatment. A prominent advocate of this approach is Dworkin, who argues that fundamental to justice is a principle of equal concern and respect for persons, and what this means in more concrete term is that equal resources should be devoted to the life of each member of society (Dworkin 2000). (The reference to membership here is not redundant, because Dworkin understands egalitarian justice as a principle that must be applied within sovereign states specifically – so in the terms of 3.2, this is a relational view of justice.) The thought is that showing persons equal respect may sometimes require us to afford them equal treatment, even in the face of relevant grounds for discrimination. Thus we insist on political equality – one person, one vote – even though we know that there are quite large differences in people’s competence to make political decisions.

As noted above, justice as simple equality of treatment seems open to the objection that it fails to acknowledge the agency of the recipients, who may have acted in ways that appear to qualify them to receive more (or less) of whatever benefit is being distributed. To answer this objection, several recent philosophers have presented alternative versions of ‘responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism’ – a family of theories of justice that treat equal distribution as a starting point but allow for departures from that baseline when these result from the responsible choices made by individuals (see Knight and Stemplowska 2011 for examples). These theories differ along several dimensions: the ‘currency of justice’ used to define the baseline of equality, the conditions that must be fulfilled for a choice to qualify as responsible, and which among the consequences that follow from a choice should count when the justice of an outcome is being assessed (it may in particular appear unjust to allow people to suffer the full consequences of bad choices that they could not reasonably have anticipated). The label that is often used to describe a sub-class of these theories is ‘luck egalitarianism’. According to luck egalitarians, justice requires that no-one should be disadvantaged relative to others on account of ‘brute’ bad luck, whereas inequalities that arise through the exercise of personal responsibility are permissible (for a full discussion of luck egalitarianism, see the entry on justice and bad luck ). ‘Brute’ luck is interpreted widely to include not only external circumstances such as one person’s initially having access to more resources than another, but also internal factors such as possessing natural abilities or disabilities, or having involuntarily acquired expensive tastes. All such inequalities are to be ironed out by redistribution or compensation, while people’s choices about how to use the assets they are granted should be respected, even if this leads to significant inequality in the long run.

Luck egalitarianism has proved surprisingly influential in recent debates on justice, despite the evident difficulties involved in, for example, quantifying ‘brute luck disadvantage’ in such a way that a compensatory scheme could be established. There are, however, a number of problems it has to face. By giving scope to personal responsibility, it seeks to capture what is perhaps the most attractive part of the conventional idea of desert – that people should be rewarded for making good choices and penalised for making bad ones – while filtering out the effects of having (undeserved) natural talents. But in reality the choices that people make are influenced by the talents and other qualities that they happen to have already. So if we allow someone to reap advantages by, for example, devoting long hours to learning to play the piano at a high level, we must recognize that this is a choice that she would almost certainly not have made unless early experiment showed that she was musically gifted. We cannot say what she would have chosen to do in a counterfactual world in which she was tone deaf. There seems then to be no coherent half-way house between accepting full-blooded desert and denying that people can justly claim relative advantage through the exercise of responsibility and choice (see further Miller 1999, ch. 7) .

A second problem is that one person’s exercise of responsibility may prove advantageous or disadvantageous to others, even though they have done nothing to bring this change about, so from their point of view it must count as ‘brute’ luck. This will be true, for example, in any case in which people are competing to excel in some field, where successful choices made by A will worsen the comparative position of B , C , and D . Or again, if A acts in a way that benefits B , but does nothing comparable to improve the position of C and D , then an inequality is created that counts as ‘brute bad luck’ from the perspective of the latter. One of the most influential exponents of luck egalitarianism seems to have recognized the problem in a late essay: ‘unlike plain egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism is paradoxical, because the use of shares by people is bound to lead to a distribution flecked by luck’ (Cohen 2011, p. 142).

We have seen that equality can sometimes be understood as required by justice; but it can also be valued independently. Indeed there can be circumstances in which the two values collide, because what justice demands is inequality of outcome. The kind of inequality that is independently valuable is social equality, best understood as a property of the relationships that prevail within a society: people regard and treat each other as social equals, and the society’s institutions are designed to foster and reflect such attitudes. A society of equals contrasts with one in which people belong to different ranks in a social hierarchy, and behave towards one another as their relative ranking prescribes. Different reasons can be given for objecting to social inequality, and conversely for valuing social equality (see Scanlon 2003).

Those who find equality valuable for reasons other than reasons of distributive justice are often described as ‘relational egalitarians’ (see Anderson 1999, Wolff 1998, Fourie, Schuppert and Wallimann-Helmer 2015). It is tempting to regard relational egalitarianism as a rival theory of justice to the luck egalitarian theory outlined in §6.2, but it may be more illuminating to see it instead as providing an alternative account of why we should care about limiting material inequality. Thus, faced with a world like the one we currently inhabit in which income differences are very large, justice theorists are likely to criticize these inequalities on grounds that they are not deserved, or arise from brute luck, etc., whereas relational egalitarians will say that they create a divided society in which people are alienated from each other, and cannot interact in a mutually respectful way. Relational equality does not address issues of distribution directly, and so cannot function as a theory of justice itself, but it can provide grounds for preferring one theory of justice to its rivals – namely that implementing that particular theory is more likely to create or sustain a society of equals.

We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. Although we found common elements running through this diversity of use – most readily captured in Justinian’s ‘suum cuique ’ formula – these were formal rather than substantive. In these circumstances, it is natural to look for an overarching framework into which the various contextually specific conceptions of justice can all be fitted. Three such frameworks were examined: utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. None, however, passed what we might call the ‘Sidgwick/Rawls test’, namely that of incorporating and explaining the majority at least of our considered convictions about justice – beliefs that we feel confident in holding about what justice requires us to do in a wide and varied range of circumstances (for Rawls’ version of the test see the entry on reflective equilibrium ). So unless we are willing to jettison many of these convictions in order to uphold one or other general framework, we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories – theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life. Rawls himself, despite the bold title of his first book ( A Theory of Justice ), came to recognize that what he had outlined was at best a theory of social justice applied to the basic institutional structure of a modern liberal state. Other forms of justice – familial, allocative, associational, international – with their associated principles would be applicable in their respective domains (for an even more explicitly pluralist account of justice, see Walzer 1983; for a fuller defence of a contextual approach to justice, see Miller 2013, esp. ch. 2).

One way to loosen up our thinking about justice is by paying greater attention to the history of the concept. We can learn a great deal by reading what Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Hume, has to say about the concept, but as we do so, we also see that elements we would expect to find are missing (there is nothing about rights in Aristotle, for example), while others that we would not anticipate are present. This may in some part be due to the idiosyncrasies of each thinker, but more importantly it reflects differences in the form of social life in which each was embedded – its economic, legal and political structure, especially. Various attempts have been made to write histories of justice that are more than just catalogues of what individual thinkers have said: they aim to trace and explain systematic shifts in the way that justice has been interpreted (for contrasting examples, see MacIntyre 1988, Fleischacker 2004, Johnston 2011). These should not be read as enlightenment stories in which our understanding of justice steadily improves as the centuries roll by. MacIntyre’s view, for example, is that modern liberal societies cannot sustain the practices within which notions of justice find their proper home. We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past, and are equally liable to disappear in the future.

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• –––, 1974, “Noncomparative Justice,” Philosophical Review , 83: 297–338.
• Fleischacker, Samuel, 2004, A Short History of Distributive Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• Frankfurt, Harry, 2015, On Inequality , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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• Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice; power and the ethics of knowing , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Garner, Robert, 2013, A Theory of Justice for Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gauthier, David, 1986, Morals by Agreement , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Harsanyi, John, 1975, “Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls’s Theory,” American Political Science Review , 69: 594–606.
• Hayek, Friedrich, 1976, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Volume II: The Mirage of Social Justice ), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature , edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• –––, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Johnston, David, 2011, A Brief History of Justice , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Kagan, Shelly, 2012, The Geometry of Desert , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Knight, Carl and Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), 2011, Responsibility and Distributive Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lind, E. Allan and Tom Tyler, 1988, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice , New York and London: Plenum Press.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1988, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , London: Duckworth.
• Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government , ed. A.D. Lindsay, London: Dent, 1964.
• Miller, David, 1999, Principles of Social Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2013, Justice for Earthlings: essays in political philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Montague, Phillip, 1980, “Comparative and Non-Comparative Justice,” Philosophical Quarterly , 30: 131–40.
• Murphy, Liam, 1998, “Institutions and the Demands of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 27, 251–91.
• Nagel, Thomas, 2005, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 33, 113–47.
• Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2006, Frontiers of Justice: disability, nationality, species membership , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Okin, Susan, 1989, Justice, Gender, and the Family , New York: Basic Books.
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• Paul, Jeffrey (ed.), 1982, Reading Nozick : essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Perry, Stephen, 2000, “On the Relationship between Corrective and Distributive Justice,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Fourth Series , edited by Jeremy Horder, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• –––, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1999, A Theory of Justice , revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2001, Justice as Fairness: a restatement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• Sandel, Michael, 1982, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• –––, 2003, “The Diversity of Objections to Inequality,” in The Difficulty of Tolerance: essays in political philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sen, Amartya, 1980, “Equality of What?” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 1 , ed. S. McMurrin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Justice , course lectures by Michael Sandel
• Justice Everywhere , a group blog about justice in public affairs

Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | consequentialism | consequentialism: rule | contractualism | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | justice: as a virtue | justice: distributive | justice: global | justice: intergenerational | justice: international distributive | justice: retributive | justice: transitional | luck: justice and bad luck | Rawls, John | reflective equilibrium | social contract: contemporary approaches to

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field We invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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By Michelle Maiese  and Heidi Burgess

(Original written by Michelle Maiese and published July 2003; updated by Heidi Burgess in June 2013, and again in July, 2020.)

Current Implications

The word "justice" is being used a lot in the summer of 2020, usually in the phrase "Justice for George Floyd" or "Justice for Breonna Taylor" or "racial justice." But few people seem to be unpacking what the term "justice" means.  It is hard to understand how defunding the police would bring justice to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, although, some might argue it would mean their deaths were not in vain. But let's unpack the notion of justice in the context of this summer's events.  More...

Justice is action in accordance with the requirements of some law. Whether these rules are grounded in human consensus or societal norms, they are supposed to ensure that all members of society receive fair treatment. Issues of justice arise in several different spheres and play a significant role in causing, perpetuating, and addressing conflict. Just institutions tend to instill a sense of stability, well-being, and satisfaction among society members, while perceived injustices can lead to dissatisfaction, rebellion, or revolution. Each of the different spheres expresses the principles of justice and fairness in its own way, resulting in different types and concepts of justice: distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative. These types of justice have important implications for socio-economic, political, civil, and criminal justice at both the national and international level.[1]

Distributive justice , or economic justice, is concerned with giving all members of society a "fair share" of the benefits and resources available. However, while everyone might agree that wealth should be distributed fairly, there is much disagreement about what counts as a "fair share." Some possible criteria of distribution are equity, equality, and need. (Equity means that one's rewards should be equal to one's contributions to a society, while "equality" means that everyone gets the same amount, regardless of their input. Distribution on the basis of need means that people who need more will get more, while people who need less will get less.) Fair allocation of resources, or distributive justice, is crucial to the stability of a society and the well-being of its members. Different people will define "fair" differently: some will say that fairness is equity; others equality; still others, need. When issues of distributive justice are inadequately addressed and the item to be distributed is highly valued, intractable conflicts frequently result. This was the essence of the conflicts playing out across Europe and in United States politics in 2012-2013--over taxes, deficits, "austerity programs," jobs, rights of labor, etc. It is part of the story about the racial conflicts which have taken a high profile in the summer of 2020, although procedural and retributive justice are also a large part of this conflict.

Procedural justice is concerned with making and implementing decisions according to fair processes that ensure "fair treatment." Rules must be impartially followed and consistently applied in order to generate an unbiased decision. Those carrying out the procedures should be neutral, and those directly affected by the decisions should have some voice or representation in the decision-making process. (See the essay on public participation .) If people believe procedures to be fair, they will be more likely to accept outcomes, even ones that they do not like. Implementing fair procedures is central to many dispute resolution procedures, including negotiation , mediation , arbitration , and adjudication .

Retributive justice appeals to the notion of "just desert" -- the idea that people deserve to be treated in the same way they treat others. It is a retroactive approach that justifies punishment as a response to past injustice or wrongdoing.[2] The central idea is that the offender has gained unfair advantage through his or her behavior, and that punishment will set this imbalance straight. In other words, those who do not play by the rules should be brought to justice and deserve to suffer penalties for their transgressions. The notion of deterrence also plays in here: the hope is that the punishment for committing a crime is large enough that people will not engage in illegal activities because the risk of punishment is too high. In addition to local, state, and national justice systems, retributive justice also plays a central role in international legal proceedings, responding to violations of international law ,  human rights , and war crimes .

However, because there is a tendency to slip from retributive justice to an emphasis on revenge, some suggest that restorative justice processes are more effective. While a retributive justice approach conceives of transgressions as crimes against the state or nation, restorative justice focuses on violations as crimes against individuals. It is concerned with healing victims ' wounds, restoring offenders to law-abiding lives, and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community. Victims take an active role in directing the exchange that takes place, as well as defining the responsibilities and obligations of offenders. Offenders are encouraged to understand the harm they have caused their victims and take responsibility for it. Restorative justice aims to strengthen the community and prevent similar harms from happening in the future. At the national level, such processes are often carried out through victim-offender mediation programs, while at the international level restorative justice is often a matter of instituting truth and reconciliation commissions .[3]  

The word "justice" is being used a lot in the summer, usually in the phrase "Justice for George Floyd" or "Justice for Breonna Taylor" or "racial justice." But few people seem to be unpacking what the term "justice" means.  It is hard to understand how defunding the police would bring justice to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, although, some might argue it would mean their deaths were not in vain. But let's unpack the notion of justice in the context of this summer's events.

This article points out that there are four different types of justice: distributive (determining who gets what), procedural (determining how fairly people are treated), retributive (based on punishment for wrong-doing) and restorative (which tries to restore relationships to "rightness.")  All four of these are relevant to the events of summer 2020, and more broadly to race relations in the United States and elsewhere.

Most of the focus, it seems, is on procedural justice.  George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many, many other Black people were treated much more harshly by the police (indeed, in these two cases infinitely more harshly as they were killed) than are typical whites when they encounter the police. While it is true that unarmed White people have also been shot, statistics show that such outcomes befall Blacks in grossly disproportionate ways compared to Whites.  Similarly (though this is being talked about less), Blacks do worse throughout the entire justice process.  They are apprehended more, they are put in jail more, kept there longer (being unable to make bail as easily as most Whites can) and they are convicted and receive longer sentences than do Whites.  This is the very essence of procedural injustice, and it should be the focus of attention just as much as the narrower question of police shootings.

The focus, to a lesser extent, is on retributive justice, particularly whether and how the police officers that killed Floyd, Taylor, or others will be held accountable.  Historically, police are seldom held accountable for excessive use of force.  This is sometimes due to the notion of "qualified immunity" which holds that public officials cannot be held responsible for professional misconduct unless they violated "clearly established law."  While one would think that shooting an unarmed civilian would be a violation of "clearly established law," in principle, in the past that has been very difficult to uphold in court, and most police have thus not been tried at all, or were acquitted when they were tried.  (That said, there is an argument to be made that some accommodation ought to be made for law enforcement officers who are repeatedly sent into dangerous situations with almost no information about what, exactly, is happening and where they may be called upon to instantly decide how best to respond to potentially deadly threats. In the case of George Floyd, however, it seems very clear that the officer who killed Floyd was not being personally threatened, nor did he have to make an instantaneous decision.  

On the other hand, as I discussed in the paragraph about procedural justice, retributive justice is alive and well when it comes to sentencing Blacks.  They are much less likely than Whites to get off with easy plea bargains, and are likely to get harsher sentences with less opportunity for parole.  So this, too is an issue that needs to be looked at and likely remedied.

The notion of distributive justice isn't being discussed as much this summer, but it certainly is a big part of the story of race in this country, and it is beginning to be talked about more.  We just published a new case study on Beyond Intractability that looked at how reconciliation between Blacks and Whites was sabotaged during the post-Civil War "Reconstruction Era." The way released slaves were treated just after the war set them and our country as a whole on a course of distributive injustice no matter how you define it: equity, equality, or need. 

There is no way to make things right with generations that have passed, but we certainly should look now at how we can start to make things right after 150 years.  However, it is probably unrealistic to expect that current generations of Whites will be willing or even able to compensate for 150 years' worth of loses. Nor, I would argue, is it reasonable to expect them to do so. But it is reasonable to ask Whites and Blacks (and others who have suffered a history of discrimination to sit down together and to jointly develop an image of what distributive justice would look like for everyone now—and into the future.  The only way such a discussion could possibly succeed, and indeed, the only way policy changes to come out of such discussions could possibly succeed, is if everyone really means everyone.  They would need to come to an agreement about how distributive justice should be defined, and how we can get there from where we are now.  Both agreements would need to be sufficiently inclusive that people of all races would "buy in" to these ideas and agree to start working toward them.  If any one group tries to impose its own narrow and self-serving image of justice on the others, it will not have sufficient support to be attainable over the short or long terms.

The final type of justice is restorative, and while this one should have a lot of relevance in this summer's discussion, I have heard hardly a mention of it.  Restorative justice seeks to restore relationships to "rightness."  Now, it could be argued that it is impossible to restore relationships to rightness when they never were "right," but if one modified the notion of restorative justice to mean justice to create healthy relationships where they were absent before, you would have a very powerful tool for social justice, it seems to me.  Restorative justice seeks to repair what is broken, compensate victims for harms done, and reconcile relationships between individual people so that they can live together peacefully in the future.  True, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cannot live peacefully with anybody. But police can engage in restorative justice with the communities Floyd and Taylor lived in; indeed, police in all U.S. cities could engage in restorative justice with their citizens to good effect.  Blacks and Whites—and other peoples—could engage in restorative justice circles all around the country to try to understand each other better, and to try to develop an image of what a racially "just" society would look like, and what we can do to move in that direction. 

Such an exploration should, of course, also explore law enforcement's side of the story. There are lots of big, society-wide problems that the larger society has failed and, in many ways, not even tried, to address—drug abuse, alcoholism, inadequate care for the mentally ill, homelessness, lack of employment opportunities, poor schools, etc.  Police are, in essence, being told to use their law enforcement toolkit to keep these problems from threatening the security of more fortunate segments of the society.  We all need to own our part of the problem.

Until we unpack, understand, and pursue all four of these types of justice, racial justice and racial peace will remain an elusive goal.

-- Heidi Burgess. July, 2020.

[1] More for information on justice, see: Morton Deutsch, "Justice and Conflict," in The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice , Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, Eric C. Marcus, eds. (John Wiley & Sons, 2011). < http://books.google.com/books?id=rw61VDID7U4C >.

[2] See the chapter "Retributive Justice and the Limits of Forgiveness in Argentina," in Mark R. Amstutz, The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). < http://books.google.com/books?id=gTFnh2GuD8EC >.

[3] For further clarification of the different forms of justice, including retributive, restorative, and procedural, see Jeffrey A. Jenkins's discussion on "Types of Justice," in The American Courts: A Procedural Approach , (Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2011). < http://books.google.com/books?id=yvT5SVwbakUC >.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Types of Justice." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/types-of-justice >.

The Intractable Conflict Challenge

Our inability to constructively handle intractable conflict is the most serious, and the most neglected, problem facing humanity. Solving today's tough problems depends upon finding better ways of dealing with these conflicts.   More...

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• Updating Our Impartiality Discussions - Part 1 -- The Burgesses update their 2-year old discussion of impartiality, adding to it Martin Carcasson's notion of "principled impartiality" which adds in quality information and "small-d" democracy.
• Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of September 1, 2024 -- More in our regular set of links from readers, about colleague's activities, and from outside news and opinion sources.

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Inspiring human rights essays everybody should know

Can Human Rights Bring Social Justice? 12 Essays

Technically this is a collection of 12 separate essays, but all of them address the same topic: the intersection of human rights and social justice.

Do you want to pursue a career in human rights?

Our eBook “ Launching Your Career in Human Rights ” is an in-depth resource designed for those committed to pursuing a career in the human rights field. It covers a wide range of topics, including the types of careers available, the necessary skills and competencies, and the educational pathways that can lead to success in this sector. Whether you’re considering a master’s degree, looking for your first job, or exploring specific human rights issues, this guide offers valuable insights and practical advice. It’s a helpful tool for anyone looking to understand the complexities of working in human rights and how to effectively navigate the challenges and opportunities that come with this important work. Learn more .

Scholars from countries around the world discuss what human rights and social justice actually mean, the potential for human rights to lead to social justice (or not), and what the role of human rights organizations like Amnesty International is in the conversation and practice of human rights law and social justice. Each author offers a unique perspective, some positive and some critical, on the topic and covers a specific aspect of the topic to help create a whole picture.

Women’s Rights are Human Rights

In this publication from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the contributors explore one of the most fundamental and essential human rights: the rights of women. From the perspective of the United Nations, this publication is a comprehensive overview of the issue of human rights, including the international human rights laws and UN practices related to the topic. Additionally, it talks about specific issues relating to women’s rights, such as reproductive health, standard of living, conflict, violence against women, access to justice, and more. Through each of these specific areas, this report gives examples of the human rights framework in action through real-life cases.

Part 1: So Software Has Eaten the World: What Does It Mean for Human Rights, Security and Governance ; Part 2: Digital Disruption of Human Rights

This two-part article from Eileen Donahoe, Director of Global Affairs for Human Rights Watch, discusses the intersection of technology and human rights in an increasingly digital age. Donahoe’s experiences serving with UNHCR, Human Rights Watch, International Service for Human Rights, and Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation provide a unique and informed perspective on the challenges that technology brings the progression and implementation of human rights. The first article addresses issues related to governance and globalization, and the second article talks about the disparity in human rights that technology can cause and has caused already. For human rights professionals, her articles provide important insight to consider in the implementation and practice of human rights law.

The Perils of Indifference

Although this essay was originally a speech from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, it is important reminder of where the world has been in terms of human rights violations, as well as where we should strive to be. While the tenants of the speech are ones that most human rights professionals know, they are also tenants that can be easy to forget in the day-to-day work and the seemingly endless fight for justice. Wiesel reminds human rights professionals, along with the rest of the world, why they shouldn’t give in to indifference when the struggle for human rights is long and difficult. Beyond being an inspiring piece, this speech, and Wiesel’s writings in general, have been key pieces to human rights theory and practice, shaping the ideas and ideals we have today.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Another important historical piece in the human and civil rights movements is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In addition to defending the practice of nonviolent protest, the letter also serves as a call to action for people to take direct action against unjust laws rather than to rely or wait on the courts to serve justice. King’s letter is a reminder for all human rights professionals that the road to human rights practice is not easy and is not always black and white. As an essay addressing one of the most fundamental and long-standing human rights issues, racial inequality, this letter is an inspiring and historical reminder for all human rights professionals.

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About the author, allison reefer.

Allison Reefer is a young professional living in Pittsburgh, PA. She works with a refugee resettlement agency to help refugees and immigrants in the city, and she volunteers with a local shelter for human trafficking victims. She obtained her Master in International Development from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in Writing from Geneva College, focusing most of her academic work on human trafficking and migration in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In her free time, she loves to write, read, sing and play bass guitar, practice Russian, and explore her city.

47 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapters 2-4

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Discussion Questions

In Chapter 1, Sandel divides theories of justice into three categories: (1) “maximizing welfare,” (2) “respecting freedom,” and (3) “promoting virtue” (5-6, 18).Does the rest of the book give equal treatment to all three theories, or are some better developed than others? Do these three categories encompass all of the major approaches to justice discussed in the book? If so, how do those approaches fit into each of these three categories?

Sandel illustrates competing views of justice throughout the book using both (1) hypothetical scenarios and (2) actual moral dilemmas arising from current and historical events. Why would Sandel use both? Is one or the other more effective to illustrate his points? If so, why?

In 2012, President Obama famously said “you didn’t build that” in a speech in which he argued that successful businesses owe their success partly to public infrastructure. What view of redistribution of income does this reflect? How would a libertarian respond to that argument? Would Rawls agree or disagree with Obama’s statement?

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Social Justice Essay | Essay on Social Justice for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Social Justice Essay: A discussion of social justice should start with a definition of the term. It is said that this task can be difficult. If you do a Google search about social justice, the primary outcome offers a meaning of social justice.

It would define social justice as the reasonable and appropriate organization of laws adjusting to the customary law that all people, independent of ethnic birthplace, gender assets, race, religion, and so forth, are to be dealt with similarly and without bias. Social justice is an idea of a general public where each individual is dealt with fairly, without segregation dependent on budgetary status, race, gender, nationality, and so forth.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Social Justice for Students and Kids in English

We provide students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on Social Justice for reference.

Long Essay on Social Justice 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Social Justice is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Social justice is an idea of reasonable or adjusted relations between the individual and society as estimated by the conveyance of abundance that incorporates individual action and social advantage openings. In Western as well as in more established Asian societies, the idea of social justice has regularly alluded to the way toward guaranteeing that people satisfy their cultural jobs and get what was their due from society.

Social justice isn’t an “us versus them” mindset; rather, it is a “we are in it together” attitude where the amazing and weak work together.

A Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli coined the term first in the 1780s and spread during the revolutions of 1848. In the late industrial revolution, innovative American legal scholars started to use the term more, especially Louis Brandeis and Roscoe Pound. The various ideas of social justice, as examined in the old Western way of thinking, were normally focused upon the community. Plato believed that rights existed only between free people. During the middle Ages, some religious scholars discussion of justice in various ways,

After the Renaissance and Reformation, the advanced idea of social justice, as creating human potential, started to arise through crafted by a progression of creators.

Today, the idea of social justice frequently alludes to basic liberties, revolved around improving the lives of gatherings minimized dependent on race, identity, ethnicity, gender, sexual direction, age, religion and handicap. The five principles of social justice are Equity, Access, Diversity, Participation, Human Rights. Social justice is based on the concepts of human rights and equality.

For example, income inequality is one significant issue that is encompassed within the umbrella of social justice. The data shows that income inequality has been increasing for the past thirty years. Social justice can comprehend many issues, but ultimately, it is a crucial component of healing many of the deep divisions that the world is experiencing. While some people may criticize the idea of social justice or the need for swift action to solve some serious economic and racial issues, a proactive approach on social justice, like voting or protesting will lead to a better, brighter country.

While several global groups are looking to provide equal rights to all, racial discrimination is nonetheless a hot topic. There are laws in the area around the world, but many incidents occur to illustrate that racial discrimination has not been irradiated. Discrimination comes in all shapes. The number of birthdays that you have accrued is another example.

Ageism, where the aged are discriminated against, creates negative stereotypes of the aged being weak, feeble, or unable to change. Beyond discrimination based on age, other hot topics are gender and sexuality. In recent years, gender has morphed into a complicated topic that goes beyond the binary designations of male and female.

Social justice allocates the rights and duties in the institutions of our society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. It helps us work toward celebrating diversity in our communities and country.

Short Essay on Social Justice 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Social Justice is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Social justice is a hypothesis of nondiscriminatory and unbiased relations between an individual and society. Observable but unspoken terms determine it for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity and social privileges.

Luigi Taparelli coined the term first in the 1780s and spread during the revolutions of 1848. Socrates is credited with developing the idea of a social contract. After the Renaissance and Reformation, the advanced idea of social justice, as creating human potential, started to arise through crafted by a progression of creators.

With the modern era, the face of social justice has changed. While rallies and marches are still prevalent, the Internet is also used to bring social justice issues to light. This can be seen through movements like #blacklivesmatter and the #metoo movement against sexual harassment. These campaigns work to expand issues into bigger movements that rally activists together. Other than that voting, campaigning is the basic approaches of social justice.

10 Lines on Social Justice in English

• Luigi Taparelli coined the term first in 1780s.
• The term social justice is spread during the revolutions of 1848.
• The #metoo movement had an impact all over the world.
• Social justice can organize with others to accomplish ends that benefit the whole community.
• Income inequality is one of the biggest social problems now.
• Social justice helps us work toward celebrating diversity in our communities and country.
• One of the most useful thing in social justice is the vote.
• Twenty-three nations around the world currently allow same-sex marriage through social justice.
• Nepal is one of at least five countries where your gender can now appear as “other” on official statements.
• 20th February is the world day of social justice.

FAQ’s on Social Justice Essay

Question 1. What is an example of social justice?

Answer:  The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements are two examples of social justice in action in the United States,

Question 2. What are now important five social problems?

Answer: Poverty, Drug abuse, Prostitution, Racial discrimination are examples of social problems.

Question 3.  Is social justice good?

Answer: Social justice can organize with others to accomplish ends that benefit the whole community.

Question 4. To what extent does power or the lack of power affect individuals?

Answer: power or the lack of power can affect individuals in a bad way and a good way. For example, power can make you corrupted, and lack of power can make you ambitious.

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Speech on Justice

Justice: a word that signifies fairness and equality. It’s a pivotal aspect of society, ensuring everyone gets their due. You’ve probably heard it, but do you really know what it means?

Understanding justice can be a bit tricky. It’s not just about punishment or reward; it’s about balance. Let’s explore this concept together.

1-minute Speech on Justice

Hello everyone. Today, I want to talk about a simple but powerful word, “Justice”. Justice is like a big tree giving us shade on a hot day. It makes sure everyone is treated fairly, no one is left out, and no one is hurt.

In our first story, imagine you’re in a race. You’ve trained hard, and you’re ready to win. But just as the race begins, someone trips you. Is that fair? No, right? Justice, in this case, means that the person who tripped you is punished and you get a chance to race again. This is justice as fairness.

Now, let’s think about a different tale. Imagine you and your friend both want the last piece of cake. You could split it, but your friend already had two pieces and you only had one. Justice here could mean that you get the last piece, balancing things out. This is justice as equality.

For our last story, imagine you broke your friend’s toy by accident. You feel bad, and you decide to replace it with a new one. Here, justice means that when we make a mistake, we take responsibility and try to fix it. This is justice as responsibility.

So, my friends, justice is fairness, equality, and taking responsibility. It’s like a big tree that covers us all, keeping us safe and happy. Let’s promise to help this tree grow in our homes, our schools, and our communities.

Also check:

2-minute Speech on Justice

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Justice is a simple word with a profound meaning. It’s like a big umbrella that covers fair play, honesty, and equality. It’s about making sure everyone gets what they deserve, not more, not less.

Let’s imagine a game of soccer. All players follow rules. If someone breaks them, the referee blows the whistle. The rule-breaker gets a penalty. That’s justice. It ensures fairness in the game. Just like soccer, we have rules in life too. When someone breaks these rules, justice makes sure they face the consequences.

Justice isn’t just about punishing people who do wrong. It’s also about standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. It’s about making sure the weak and the voiceless are heard. When a bully takes away a smaller kid’s lunch, justice is when someone steps in to say, “That’s not right.”

But, justice can sometimes be slow. It’s like a giant wheel that turns at its own pace. We’ve all heard the saying, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That means when justice takes too long, it’s as if there’s no justice at all. It’s important to remember that while the wheel of justice may turn slowly, it does turn. We should never lose hope.

Justice isn’t just the job of lawyers, judges, or police officers. It’s the responsibility of all of us. When we see something wrong happening, we should step forward. When we know about a crime and stay silent, we become part of the problem. By speaking out, we can be part of the solution.

In conclusion, justice is a treasure we must all safeguard. It’s a promise of fairness, a shield for the weak, and a hope for a better world. It may be slow, but it’s sure. And it’s not just the duty of a few, but the responsibility of all. Let’s pledge to uphold justice, in big ways and small, every day of our lives.

We also have speeches on more interesting topics that you may want to explore.

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5 (page 74) p. 74 Justice

• Published: June 2003
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Justice has to do with punishment and reward, and also with equality, but how should we define it? ‘Justice’ examines what justice really means and what principles we apply to decide when outcomes are fair. One principle of just distribution is equality, and some political philosophers have claimed that it is the only principle — all justice is a kind of equality. However, need and desert give us two very basic reasons why justice can require us to treat people differently. One good reason for not treating people in the same way is that they have different needs . Doing justice is a complex matter, and what counts as giving someone his or her due is to a large extent contextually determined.

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Short Essay on “Justice Must Reach The Poor”

Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on law, rationality, ethics, rationality, natural law, equity or religion. It is also the act of being fair and just.

The question is how many are following the path of justice. We live in a materialistic world, where ethics, laws and order etc. are less cared about. Everything can be purchased with money even love and respect. People are generally measure others on the scale of richness, the more rich a person is the more will be his love and respect in the society and vice-versa.

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of”–Confucius.

People with lack of money suffers everywhere, they not only struggle for their survival but also find it hard to earn respect in the society. Being poor is a curse, people with no money end up doing low paid jobs with no bright future. We can see examples of many domestic works who works hard day and night in the same household throughout their life.

Image Courtesy: http://www.northeasttoday.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/court3.jpg

Money can buy anything such as joy, freedom, respect and even justice. The culture of bribe is prevalent everywhere, if you have money in your pocket you can get any work done. High officials are bribed in cash or kind, which makes rich becoming richer and poor becoming poorer.

The idea of honesty and hard-work can hardly make a person rich. How can a poor even dream of changing his financial status. More than half of his day is wasted in doing lower level and low paid jobs. Next even if he tries to find new work or start a business he has no capital or money to bribe higher officials.

There is need to change the system of bribe and unjust. Justice must reach the poor. Everyone has equal rights for justice, but the problem is many times poor are uneducated are unaware about the injustice happening with them. They work on lower wages and feel grateful to their masters, unaware of the fact that their masters are the one exploiting them.

Imagine a country where all citizens are aware of their rights, and work only at those places where they are paid fairly. No one will be able to mold law and order for their selfish interest and have to pay fairly and treat their workers fairly in order to get the work done.

Heaven will fall on earth if every citizen no matter rich or poor follow rules and regulation of the country and treat others with love and respect. Justice can only take place if we can increase the dignity of labour and get rid of the unethical practices like bribe.

We are the one responsible for our world. Change from us can ultimately change our society for better. Pay fairly to your workers at home and office, treat them with respect. It is only because of their hard work we lead a peaceful life. Educate them a bout their rights. Even encourage your kids to treat them nicely.

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